Time and Frequency Synchronisation in 4G OFDM Systems

This paper presents a complete synchronisation scheme of a baseband OFDM receiver for the currently designed 4G mobile communication system. Since the OFDM transmission is vulnerable to time and frequency offsets, accurate estimation of these parameters is one of the most important tasks of the OFDM receiver. In this paper, the design of a single OFDM synchronisation pilot symbol is introduced. The pilot is used for coarse timing offset and fractional frequency offset estimation. However, it can be applied for fine timing synchronisation and integer frequency offset estimation algorithms as well. A new timing metric that improves the performance of the coarse timing synchronisation is presented. Time domain synchronisation is completed after receiving this single OFDM pilot symbol.