Joint synchronization and parameter estimation in OFDM signaling

Challenges in cognitive radio and tactical communications include recognizing anonymously received signals and estimating parameters in a blind or semiblind manner. In this paper, we examine this issue for orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) signaling. There are several parameters in OFDM signaling, and the blind receiver must extract and consider the synchronization issue. We assume that the blind receiver is aware of modulation type, OFDM, and not aware of chip duration and the length of cyclic prefix. First, we present new criteria based on kurtosis to estimate these parameters and compare their performance at different levels of additive white Gaussian noise with methods based on correlation, kurtosis, maximum likelihood, and matched filter. Then, we perform synchronization and estimate the start time based on these criteria and several new criteria in two steps: fine and coarse synchronization. Finally, in a more practical setup, we present the idea of jointly estimating the mentioned parameters and the signal start time as coarse synchronization. We compare different criteria and show that one of the proposed criteria has the highest efficiency.