Decision Feedback Frequency Offset Estimation and Tracking for General ICI Self-Cancellation Based OFDM Systems

Inter-carrier interference (ICI) self-cancellation schemes were often employed in many OFDM systems as a simple and effective approach to suppress ICI caused by carrier frequency errors. The same procedure, however, can not perform very well at high frequency offsets. We propose a simple decision feedback scheme based on the general ICI self-cancellation scheme to perform estimation and tracking of the carrier frequency offsets. A system with the scheme does not consume additional bandwidth since it used the same data symbols employed for ICI cancellation for the estimation. After an initial estimation is completed, the scheme switches to the tracking mode to carry out the estimation of deviations in the frequency offsets. Finally this fine-tuned estimate is applied to the ICI self-cancellation scheme concurrently for frequency offset correction and hence improved the system performance greatly. Simulation results showed that our scheme allowed up to 9% of random variations in the frequency offset. The effectiveness of our scheme is further verified by calculating the bit error rate performance of various OFDM receivers.