An Efficient Symbol Timing Scheme for OFDM Systems Using Optimal Correlation-Based Circular-Shifted Preamble

We propose a coarse symbol timing scheme for wireless orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) systems using an optimal correlation-based circular-shifted preamble (CSP). Our proposed scheme is implemented by off-line correlation-ranking and on-line processing. The on-line processing derives an optimal CSP for transmission according to the off-line correlation-ranking, and employs a delayed multiplication operation for symbol timing. The conducted simulation results show that our proposed scheme outperforms the other existing representative schemes over typical multi-path fading channels in terms of mean square error (MSE) while keeping the computational complexity low.