Sparse Blind Carrier-Frequency Offset Estimation for OFDMA Uplink

Abstract

Carrier-frequency offset (CFO) estimation for uplink orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing access (OFDMA) systems is very challenging as it requires the estimation of multiple CFOs. In this paper, we propose a new framework referred to as sparse blind CFO estimation for interleaved uplink OFDMA. The proposed framework first discretizes the potential frequency offset ranges into discrete grid points, and formulates the original CFO estimation into a sparse signal recovery problem. Then, a novel two-stage matrix Bayesian compressive sensing-based CFO estimation method is proposed to solve the formulated problem. In the first stage, we employ a relatively large grid interval, and iteratively reconstruct a hyperparameter vector to generate a coarse estimation of multiple CFOs. The second stage reduces the grid interval, and the refined CFOs are estimated one by one through a novel low-complexity one-dimension searching algorithm. Numerical results show that the proposed method significantly outperforms conventional ones in terms of estimation accuracy, especially in the scenarios, such as low signal-to-noise ratios, large CFOs, and a large number of users.