Enhanced Synchronization of 5G integrated Satellite Systems in Multipath Channels

The 5G integrated satellite communication (SatCom) aims to provide scalable, and high-capacity services with wide coverage. However, complex satellite channel characteristics such as high timing offset and frequency offset make system synchronization difficult. Orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM), which is the fundamental waveform of the fifth-generation mobile communication (5G), is adopted in the integrated systems. In this paper, we first propose a multi-symbol merging blind timing algorithm based on the cyclic prefix (CP) to improve the accuracy of timing. Then, an enhanced synchronization scheme is proposed to realize precise time-frequency error correction in an integrated communication scenario. Simulation results show that multi-symbol merging timing performs better than single-symbol way under low signal to noise ratio (SNR) conditions. Further, good performance of bit error ratio (BER) is realized by the proposed timing and frequency synchronization scheme.