Near Optimal Timing and Frequency Offset Estimation for 5G Integrated LEO Satellite Communication System

The integration of satellite and terrestrial 5G networks aims to provide ubiquitous coverage, improve service reliability, and enable the network scalability. However, the inherent characteristics of satellite channels bring challenges on the air interface design of integrated terrestrial-satellite networks. For example, for low earth orbits (LEO) mobile satellite communication (SatCom) system, it is unclear so far whether the 5G new radio (5G-NR) synchronization signals could meet the requirement of timing and frequency offset estimation in the presence of large Doppler shifts. In this paper, we investigate time and frequency synchronization for the downlink transmission of 5G-NR signals over LEO satellite channels. Starting from the maximum log-likelihood criterion for timing offset estimation given the observation of the received primary synchronization signals (PSS), we derive an upper bound of the objective function for simplicity. With a priori information that the maximum Doppler shift of LEO satellite-ground link is within a specific range, we construct the local synchronization sequence via using the modulated discrete prolate spheroidal sequences (DPSS) vectors. Then the timing offset estimation can be recast into a one-dimensional peak search problem. Moreover, the cyclic prefix (CP) structure of orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) can be utilized to improve the estimation performance further. Once the timing and frequency offset are captured in the above initial synchronization phase, the tracking synchronization can be much simplified as the variation of both the timing and frequency offset is very small between two adjacent synchronization blocks. Simulation results show that by using the proposed algorithms, the 5G-NR signals can achieve near optimal downlink time and frequency synchronization in typical LEO SatCom systems.