Carrier Frequency Offset Recovery Research Articles

System Error Calibration in Large Datasets of Wireless Channel Sounding for Industrial Applications.

In industrial applications, the large comprehensive wireless channel impulse response (CIR) reference dataset, measured by National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), has been a useful tool for understanding propagation within factory environments. The NIST CIR reference dataset is obtained using a precision channel sounder instrument where transmitter and receiver are time-synchronized by two rubidium clocks. While the accuracy of the NIST CIRs is much higher than the CIRs measured by general commercial digital receiver, two types of system errors have been discovered within the dataset from the perspective of signal processing. These errors are significant for wireless localization, physical layer security, and related applications. To calibrate the CIR, two channel sounder error calibration methods (CSEC) is proposed: the CSEC based on phase compensation and carrier frequency offset recovery. Our results reveal that the CSEC method can improve the accuracy of the CIR to the accuracy that precise instruments cannot achieve. To demonstrate the consequence of these systemic errors, a case study involving physical layer authentication is investigated showing a marked improvement in authentication accuracy after the systemic errors in the dataset are removed. Moreover, the CSEC method may be used to correct other CIR datasets with similar systemic errors.

Frequency Estimation in OFDM Direct-Conversion Receivers Using a Repeated Preamble

This paper investigates the problem of carrier frequency offset (CFO) recovery in an OFDM receiver affected by frequency-selective in-phase/quadrature (I/Q) imbalances. The analysis is based on maximum-likelihood (ML) methods and relies on the transmission of a training preamble with a repetitive structure in the time domain. After assessing the accuracy of the conventional ML (CML) scheme in a scenario characterized by I/Q impairments, we review the joint ML (JML) estimator of all unknown parameters and evaluate its theoretical performance. In order to improve the estimation accuracy, we also present a novel CFO recovery method that exploits some side-information about the signal-to-interference ratio. It turns out that both CML and JML can be derived from this scheme by properly adjusting the value of a design parameter. The accuracy of the investigated methods are compared with the relevant Cramer–Rao bound. Our results can be used to check whether conventional CFO recovery algorithms can work properly or not in the presence of I/Q imbalances and also to evaluate the potential gain attainable by more sophisticated schemes.

A Two Stage Algorithm for Carrier Frequency Offset Recovery with DSP Implementation on SDR Platform

A Two Stage Algorithm for Carrier Frequency Offset Recovery with DSP Implementation on SDR Platform

Joint Maximum Likelihood Estimation of CFO, Noise Power, and SNR in OFDM Systems

Estimation of noise power and signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) are fundamental tasks in wireless communications. Existing methods to recover these parameters in orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) are derived by following heuristic arguments and assuming perfect carrier frequency offset (CFO) synchronization. Hence, it is currently unknown how they compare with an optimum scheme performing joint maximum likelihood (ML) estimation of CFO, noise power and SNR. In the present work, the joint ML estimator of all these parameters is found by exploiting the repetitive structure of a training preamble composed of several identical parts. It turns out that CFO recovery is the first task that needs to be performed. After CFO compensation, the ML estimation of noise power and SNR reduces to a scheme that is available in the literature, but with a computational saving greater than 60% with respect to the original formulation. To assess the ultimate accuracy achievable by the ML scheme, novel expressions of the Cramer-Rao bound for the joint estimation of all unknown parameters are provided.

A memory-reduced direct digital frequency synthesizer for OFDM receiver systems

Digital direct frequency synthesizer (DDFS) can be used to correct the carrier frequency offset (CFO) whose estimation and recovery are essential important in OFDM receiver systems. Traditional DDFS makes use of modulus 2N arithmetic and may provide fine frequency tuning capabilities using a sine/cosine look up table. However, straightforward implementation results in enormous amounts of memory and power consumption. This paper proposes a novel DDFS according to the adopted CFO recovery scheme, in which the integer CFO is corrected after the FFT by summing a constant to the index used to read the results of the FFT and the decimal CFO can be compensated with tuning on the increment word of the DDFS of the mixer. Its phase accumulator and ROM are split into three smaller parts based on the trigonometric approximate. Further, according to their characteristics each one has been compressed. Performance analysis has been carried out and shows that 96% and 61% memory reduction can be achieved compared with Moran and Memoyo's method and Kesoulis's method, respectively. The design will be implemented in OFDM such as DVB-T systems.

Low-complexity blind carrier frequency recovery for OFDM signals over frequency-selective radio channels

This paper introduces a blind (i.e., data independent) algorithm for carrier frequency offset recovery in an orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) receiver operating over frequency-selective fading channels. The main idea behind this algorithm is to exploit the time-frequency-domain exchange inherent to the modulation scheme. Due to this feature, a carrier frequency offset has a similar impact on OFDM as a clock timing offset has in a quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM) system. The scheme we propose is a variant of Oerder-Meyr's (1988) feedforward clock recovery. Its performance is assessed by simulation, and the results are compared to those obtained from Van de Beek-Sandell-Borjesson's (1997) frequency synchronizer, which bears comparable complexity. The new scheme is shown to outperform the latter over frequency-selective fading channels, notably at medium to high signal-to-noise ratios. We also evaluated the efficiency of two different (time domain and frequency domain) offset correction strategies embedded in a particular OFDM receiver.