Blind iterative carrier offset estimation for OFDM systems

Abstract

The presence of residual carrier offset in an orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) system leads to a loss of orthogonality between the subcarriers, which is known to degrade the system performance if left uncompensated. In the literature, Liu and Tureli proposed a blind method to solve such a problem [1], making use of the fact that not all subcarriers are used for data transmission. However, the computational complexity of this method is very high. In [2], the author introduced a low complexity carrier offset estimation method based on lower-order Taylor series approximation on the cost function. In this paper, from the method in [2], we develop an iterative carrier offset estimation method which leads to significant performance gain in both MSE of carrier offset estimation and the symbol error rate (SER).