OFDM Synchronization in the presence of interference

Timing Synchronization at the receiver of an Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) system is the first step towards extracting the information contained within the received OFDM frame. In this paper we will be looking at the robustness of the Schmidl and Cox timing synchronisation algorithm in a dynamic spectrum access environment where interference is present. Interference with respect to the secondary user refers to the electromagnetic wave transmitted by the primary user in an environment where the primary and the secondary users are sharing the same spectrum. In order to describe the occupied spectrum of the primary user, we will be utilising the fractional bandwidth (FBW) mode. The FBW mode would serve as an indicator describing the position of the secondary user on the shared spectrum. Initial testing was carried out using Matlab and the final implementation and testing were done on Software Defined Radio (SDR) using a testbed developed at the TI institute.