A Closed Concept for Synchronization and Cell Search in 3GPP LTE Systems

In this paper we investigate the time and frequency synchronization as well as the sector and cell search for the 3GPP long term evolution (LTE) downlink. The proposed algorithms rely on the synchronization and cell-specific reference signals and are hence compliant to most recent 3GPP specifications. Time and (fractional) frequency offset coarse synchronization are performed in the time domain with the cyclic prefix based autocorrelation, while the sector and cell as well as the integer frequency offset are estimated in the frequency domain by using the primary and secondary synchronization signals. To improve the cell detection reliability, the estimated cell is afterwards confirmed through the cell-specific reference signal. All algorithms are evaluated under multipath channel conditions and an initial carrier frequency mismatch. Compromising high performance with reasonable implementation complexity, we draw a practical solution for an LTE receiver.