An Improved Preamble Aided Timing Estimation Method for OFDM Systems

This paper presents an improved robust method for timing offset estimation in preamble-aided OFDM system. The proposed method is aimed to provide low complexity, high performance timing estimator under the high frequency offset conditions. It uses a modified preamble structure and utilizes double autocorrelation technique to achieve robust timing estimation performance with only moderate increase in complexity. We finally evaluated and compared the performance of the proposed method in terms of mean square error (MSE) in AWGN, Rayleigh fading ISI channels and HIPERLAN/2 indoor channel A. The results indicate that the new method has a significantly smaller estimator MSE than the previously presented methods.