Blind Estimation of Channel Order and SNR for OFDM Systems

In this paper, blind channel order and signal to noise ratio (SNR) estimators based on time-varying autocorrelation function (TVAF) are proposed for orthogonal frequency division multiplexing systems. The TVAF of the received signal reveals clearly the inherent periodicity introduced by cyclic prefix (CP) and carries rich information of channel and additive noise. To investigate the relationships among the TVAF, channel order, and SNR, a newly close-form expression of the TVAF of the received signal is derived. Not only the CP-induced TVAF components but the channel-spread TVAF elements are employed to derive the proposed estimators. Specifically, the two kinds of the TVAF components are separate from the components superimposed by the additive noise, which enables optimal estimation performance even for the low SNR regime. Numerical results show that, in contrast with the alternative methods, the proposed estimators achieve significant performance gain in the low SNR regime, while hold competitive performance in the high SNR regime.