Frequency offset estimation in SC-FDMA systems

In this paper, we propose a method to estimate the carrier frequency offset (CFO) generated by local oscillator instabilities in the single carrier frequency division multiple access (SC-FDMA) systems with interleaved mapping. We dedicate a part of each transmitted block to a designed pilot signal and develop an estimation method based on the maximum a posteriori (MAP) criterion. The simulation results validate the precision of this method especially for high signal to noise ratios (SNR). Since the pilot signal is embedded in the data block, we investigate its effect on the peak to average power ratio (PAPR) of the SC-FDMA signal and show that the increase in the PAPR is still negligible compared to orthogonal frequency division multiple access (OFDMA) systems. We also compensated for the effect of the frequency offset by using a parallel interference canceller system.