Improved superimposed training sequence-based timing synchronization for space optical orthogonal frequency division multiplexing system

Abstract

This paper investigates the timing synchronization problem of a space optical orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OOFDM) communication system. First, based on the good autocorrelation property of gen- eralized chirp-like sequence, a training sequence is constructed to fit the non-negative light intensity signal requirement of the OOFDM system, of which the front and rear portions are cyclical and the whole is mirror- symmetric. No longer a periodic-repetition structure, the mirror-symmetric structure can effectively avoid the side lobe of objective function and reduce the complexity of correlation calculation, and thereby can improve the synchronization performance. Then, the constructed training sequence is superimposed on a complete data symbol for transmission to efficiently utilize transmitting power and spectrum resources of the communication system. At the receiver, the position of timing synchronization is estimated using maximum-likelihood algorithm and the correlation between the local sequence and the received signal. Simulation results show that, compared with several existing methods, the proposed timing synchronization method achieves better synchronization performances under both strong and weak atmospheric turbulence channels. © 2015 Society of Photo-Optical