Joint Blind Adaptive Carrier Frequency Offset Estimation and Channel Shortening

Multicarrier modulation has the advantage of robustness to multipath, so long as the delay spread of the multipath is less than the guard interval between successive transmitted blocks. However, it has the disadvantage of sensitivity to a carrier frequency offset (CFO), which disrupts the orthogonality of the subcarriers. If a CFO is present, it must be estimated and then corrected. In addition, if the channel delay spread exceeds the guard interval, this must be accounted for as well, usually by a channel shortening equalizer. Hitherto, CFO estimation and channel shortening have been addressed individually. However, this leads to a circular set of assumptions, since standard CFO estimators perform poorly when the channel is longer than the guard interval, and standard channel shorteners assume that CFO estimation has already been perfectly performed. In this paper, we investigate a blind, adaptive method for jointly performing CFO estimation and channel shortening.