A low-complexity algorithm for OFDM phase noise estimation

Phase noise compensation plays an indispensable role in realizing the potential of orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) for high-data-rate communications. Due to various heuristics employed to deal with the particular properties of phase noise, the existing approaches are still performance-limited in terms of accuracy and computational cost. In this paper, we focus on channel estimation stage and formulate the problem of phase noise compensation in the time domain. An efficient algorithm is devised using the majorization-minimization technique with guaranteed convergence. Numerical results with phase noise generated as a Wiener process demonstrate that our proposed algorithm is able to provide substantially improved phase noise and channel estimates with lower mean squared error especially for moderate signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). The computational complexity is also much lower than that of the benchmark.