A novel low-complexity estimation of sampling and carrier frequency offsets in OFDM communications

This paper presents a novel low-complexity sequential, blind, pilot-assisted estimator for the sampling frequency offset (SFO) and the carrier frequency offset (CFO), for orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) communications. The proposed algorithm processes the received subcarriers to obtain a cost function which depends only on a single unknown parameter at a time, either the SFO or the CFO, as well as on a specifically designed auxiliary parameter, while ignoring the noise. Then, by computing the cost function at a few selected values of the auxiliary parameter, an explicit estimator for each unknown parameter is derived, thereby avoiding the need for a search. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first time such a deterministic approach is applied to the joint estimation of the SFO and the CFO. Moreover, the proposed estimator does not require knowledge of the channel coefficients at the pilot subcarriers, and achieves good performance with a relatively small number of pilot symbols, which results in a low computational complexity. Simulation results show that at low computational complexity, there are many scenarios in which the new estimator achieves smaller estimation errors compared to other existing methods.