Blind Sequential Monte Carlo Joint Tracking of Channel State and Frequency Offset in OFDM Systems

Orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) is a multi-carrier modulation scheme, which has been adopted for several wireless standards. In order to fully exploit the benefits of an OFDM system, estimation of the channel state information must be performed. Moreover a well-known problem of OFDM is its sensitivity to frequency offset between the transmitted and received carrier frequencies. This frequency offset introduces inter-carrier interference in the OFDM signal. In this paper we address the problem of jointly tracking the channel and frequency offset based on a Sequential Monte Carlo filtering approach. The proposed algorithm works in a decision-directed way, thus does not require the use of pilot symbols, providing a worth-mentioned increase in the useful data rate. Through simulations we demonstrate the efficiency of this approach against a similar approach where the Extended Kalman Filter is used. Moreover our method is compared with two recently proposed pilot-based methods.