Preamble-Based Symbol Timing Algorithms in OFDM Systems

Abstract

In orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) systems, a preamble is added at the start of the OFDM data frame in order to find the correct frame starting point. In the receiver, the symbol starting point is estimated by a correlation-based timing metric that uses the periodic properties of the preamble. In this study, a novel preamble structure using the constant amplitude zero autocorrelation (CAZAC) sequence is proposed. The performance of the timing synchronization algorithms has been compared with the proposed method in terms of mean squared error (MSE). The simulations are performed under additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) and Rayleigh multipath fading channels. The simulation results indicate that our proposed method provides better timing MSE performance for the low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) values.