Estimation of carrier frequency offset for generalized MC-CDMA systems by exploiting hidden pilots

This letter proposes a novel carrier frequency offset (CFO) estimation method for generalized multicarrier code-division multiple access (CDMA) systems in unknown frequency-selective channels utilizing hidden pilots. It is established that CFO is identifiable in the frequency domain by employing cyclic statistics (CS) and linear regression (LR) algorithms. We show that the CS-based estimator is capable of mitigating the normalized CFO (NCFO) to a small error value. Then, the LR-based estimator can be employed to offer more accurate estimation by removing the residual quantization error after the CS-based estimator. Simulation results are presented together with the theoretical analysis, and a good match between them is observed.