Abstract
Abstract This paper addresses altogether time and frequency synchronization in IEEE 802.11a orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) wireless communication systems. The proposed algorithms have two main features: (i) they make use of an additional source of information available at IEEE 802.11a physical layer, on top of the usual ones typically adopted for synchronization such as training sequences. This additional source of information is provided by the higher layers of the communication protocol. In fact, when the carrier sense multiple access with collision avoidance (CSMA/CA) protocol is activated, the receiver is able to predict some parts of the SIGNAL field that are classically assumed unknown. Moreover, during the negotiation of the transmission medium reservation, the exchanged frames not only help the receiver to predict the SIGNAL field but also to obtain information about the channel state. (ii) Based on this property, we propose a joint MAP time and frequency synchronization algorithm using all available information. Finally, the time synchronization is fine tuned by means of a specific metric in the frequency domain that allows us to minimize the expectation of the transmission error function over all channel estimate errors. Simulation results compliant with the IEEE 802.11a standard in both indoor and outdoor environments show that the proposed algorithm drastically improves the performance in terms of synchronization failure probability and bit error ratio, compared to state-of-the-art algorithms.
Highlights
Due to its flexibility and efficiency in coping with interference channels, orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) has been adopted by many recent standards, among which is the IEEE 802.11a standard [1]
The NDA approach usually employs the extension of an OFDM symbol, known as the cyclic prefix (CP), which corresponds to the last OFDM samples duplicated in front of the OFDM symbol
The maximum a posteriori (MAP) estimates of the channel coefficients and the normalized carrier frequency offset (CFO) are given by h, ˆ = arg max lnP h, |rp, (11)
Summary
Due to its flexibility and efficiency in coping with interference channels, orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) has been adopted by many recent standards, among which is the IEEE 802.11a standard [1]. Based on the respective advantages of both NDA and DA approaches, new algorithms jointly exploiting them have been developed for time synchronization in [21,22,23] and for both time and frequency synchronization in [24], all for the IEEE 802.11a wireless system This is made feasible by a careful study of the communication protocol so as to artificially increase the size of the training sequences and to characterize the channel estimates. Rather than trying to find the best channel estimator, we derive a timing metric that minimizes the expectation of the transmission error probability over all channel estimation errors This strategy is carried out in the frequency domain when the CFO of the received signal is assumed to be perfectly compensated by the proposed algorithm.
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