A new data-aided OFDM symbol timing synchronization algorithm based on histogram processing

Abstract

A new data-aided OFDM symbol timing synchronization method is developed with two goals in mind: to achieve robust performance and to reduce computational cost. It is the intuitive observation of the relationship between the symbol timing shift and the constellation rotation on each subcarrier of an OFDM symbol from which the new method is developed. A histogram-based algorithm is used to extract the timing shift information from the FFT output. Simulations are conducted to verb the effectiveness and robustness of this new algorithm. Comparison with commonly-used algorithms based on correlation is also provided.