Joint timing and frequency synchronization for IEEE 802.16 OFDM systems

In this paper we present joint timing and frequency synchronization algorithms for IEEE 802.16 orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) systems. It is found that the proposed integer frequency offset (IFO) estimation can tolerate large IFO experienced by the 802.16 OFDM systems and is insensitive to timing error. For multipath channel, the fine timing synchronization provides not only the accurate position of incoming frame but also the positions of several paths that have large power. These positions can be used to locate the FFT window properly to eliminate inter-symbol interference (ISI). Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed joint timing and frequency synchronization algorithms have good performance even at low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) in multipath environment with large frequency offset