Recently, orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) has found many applications in mobile wireless digital communication systems, such as wireless local area network (WLAN) and digital radio mondiale (DRM). Because of its outstanding character...
Recently, orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) has found many applications in mobile wireless digital communication systems, such as wireless local area network (WLAN) and digital radio mondiale (DRM). Because of its outstanding characteristics, it enables high data rate transmissions over frequency selective fading channels without complex equalization filters. OFDM with guard interval schemes also facilitates the design of a single frequency network (SFN) in mobile digital broadcasting systems.
Multiple input multiple output (MIMO) systems provide multiple diversities for independent transmission channels. Combining OFDM with the MIMO technology is an effective solution to promise a significant increase in the practically achievable throughput over wireless media. The eployment of multiple antennas at an OFDM transceiver can be exploited to improve reliability. Cyclic delay diversity (CDD) is a low-complexity transmit diversity technique for OFDM-based wireless communication systems, which transforms a multiple-input channel into an identical single-input channel with a large delay spread.
However, in order to take fully benefit of the potentials of
MIMO-OFDM systems, accurate estimation and compensation of timing and frequency offset is very crucial because the disadvantages of OFDM are inherent to MIMO-OFDM. Time offset will lead to the inter-symbol interference (ISI) and frequency offset will destroy the inter-carrier orthogonality, which can cause inter-carrier interference (ICI). Therefore, accurate synchronization procedures of time and frequency are very important to fulfil good performance of the OFDM-based wireless system. Synchronization of an OFDM system mainly includes the timing synchronization, carrier frequency synchronization and sampling clock synchronization. After coarse synchronization, residual symbol timing offset (STO), residual carrier frequency offset (CFO) and sampling frequency offset (SFO) may remain because of the insufficient accuracy during the coarse estimation. Since small CFO induces large phase rotations even for short packets, fine frequency tracking is thus a critical component
of OFDM receivers. Furthermore, these problems become worse in OFDM systems with CDD scheme, since the CDD-OFDM systems have a characteristic which increases the frequency selectivity in consequence of the channel transfer function (CTF) at the receiver.
In this dissertation, various techniques to enhance synchronization performances in OFDM-based wireless communication systems with MIMO antennas are investigated. First, an improved residual STO estimation scheme for an OFDM-based DRM system with CDD antenna is proposed. By adjusting the amount of cyclic delay of each antenna suitably, the proposed residual STO estimation scheme can reduce the effect of frequency selective fading. Second, a joint residual CFO and SFO estimation for OFDM-based DRM system with CDD antenna is proposed. To alleviate the performance degradation by frequency selectivity of CTF via adoption of CDD antenna, the proposed joint estimator is designed to maximize the power of CTF by suitably choosing the amount of cyclic delay and a pilot pattern. Finally, a robust residual CFO tracking scheme for an OFDM-based WLAN system with MIMO antenna is suggested. By employing block-by-block
estimation, the proposed CFO tracking scheme extends the estimation range with improved estimation performance. All of the proposed schemes are compared with conventional receivers. Then simulation results demonstrate that the proposed synchronization schemes outperform the conventional systems without extra equipments.
keywords : OFDM, MIMO diversity, CDD, synchronization, frequency offset, timing offset