Residual Synchronization Error Elimination in OFDM Baseband Receivers

It is well known that an OFDM receiver is vulnerable to synchronization errors. Despite fine estimations used in the initial acquisition, there are still residual synchronization errors. Though these errors are very small, they severely degrade the bit error rate (BER) performance. In this paper, we propose a residual error elimination scheme for the digital OFDM baseband receiver aiming to improve the overall BER performance. Three improvements on existing schemes are made: a pilot-aided recursive algorithm for joint estimation of the residual carrier frequency and sampling time offsets; a delay-based timing error correction technique, which smoothly adjusts the incoming data stream without resampling disturbance; and a decision-directed channel gain update algorithm based on recursive least-squares criterion, which offers faster convergence and smaller error than the least-mean-squares algorithms. Simulation results show that the proposed scheme works well in the multipath channel, and its performance is close to that of an OFDM system with perfect synchronization parameters.