A prefiltering technique to improve autocorrelation-based frequency offset estimators in flat fading communication channels

In this publication we introduce a new technique in the estimation of the frequency offset present in received MPSK encoded communication signals imbedded in AWGN and propagating over flat fading wireless channels. This method consists of applying an extra filtering operation to the received signal after matched filtering and before the application of any frequency offset estimator. The estimators in question here are in particular of the type, which rely on the sample autocorrelation function to determine the residual frequency offset.