Joint Time and Carrier Frequency Offset Estimation in Communication Systems Based on Digital Video Broadcast

One of the permanent and ever increasing requirements of next generation broadband wireless networks is providing the users with high data rates. One of the solutions for this issue is the Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM), which not only provides high rates but also uses spectrum optimally and is robust against Inter-Symbol Interference (ISI). In this regards, it is employed in many standards, such as Digital Video Broadcast (DVB). On the other hand, time and frequency synchronization is one of the main issues in designing any communication system and synchronization error may degrade the performance of the system substantially. In this paper, joint time and carrier frequency offset estimation in a communication system based on DVB is considered. As in the DVB standard no training sequence or preamble is used, therefore we study and compare synchronization methods presented in the literatures which are not based on using such training sequences. We choose a method with the best performance among studied methods. Also, using computer simulation, we study the performance behavior of the best selected method in AWGN as well as multipath fading channels. Simulation results show that the selected method provides desirable performance in practical systems.