Time and frequency synchronization of orthogonal frequency division multiple access systems

In this paper we propose a non-data aided synchronization algorithm for orthogonal frequency division multiple access systems. The method is applied to both quasi-synchronous and asynchronous systems. The proposed algorithm does not require the transmission of training sequences or of repeated symbols and, differently from all available methods, our frequency estimator has performance independent of the channel zero locations. We provide an analytic expression for the variance of the frequency offset estimator and then we validate our theoretical findings with simulation results.