2009 Volume E92.B Issue 8 Pages 2577-2583
In OFDM systems, the estimation/correction of carrier frequency offset (CFO) is crucial to maintain orthogonality among subcarriers. However, the CFO estimation suffers from DC offset (DCO) generated in low-cost direct-conversion receivers (DCRs). More seriously, in practice, DCO is time-varying due to the automatic gain control. In this paper, a novel CFO estimator in the presence of time-varying DCO is proposed. It is shown the residual DCO after high-pass filtering varies in a linear fashion. Based on this observation and the periodicity of the training sequence, we derive a CFO estimator independent of DCO. Also, the residual DCO can be estimated, using the obtained CFO. The validity of the proposed estimation method is demonstrated by simulations.