IEEE SIGNAL PROCESSING LETTERS, VOL. 11, NO.

2, FEBRUARY 2004 83

A Blind OFDM Synchronization Algorithm

Based on Cyclic Correlation
Byungjoon Park, Student Member, IEEE, Hyunsoo Cheon, Eunseok Ko, Student Member, IEEE,
Changeon Kang, Senior Member, IEEE, and Daesik Hong, Member, IEEE

Abstract—Future wireless systems will need to employ blind
estimation to achieve better spectral efficiency. In this letter, we
introduce a blind synchronization algorithm for jointly estimating
timing and frequency offset in orthogonal frequency division
multiplexing (OFDM) systems. The proposed estimator exploits
the second-order cyclostationarity of received signals and then
uses the symbol-timing and carrier frequency offset information
appearing in the cyclic correlation. Because it is a blind estimator,
no channel impulse response information is required. Simulations
demonstrate that the proposed estimator performs at a sufficiently
high level, thus indicating its suitability for use over fading
channels.
Index Terms—Blind synchronization, frequency offset estima-
tion, orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM), timing
offset estimation.
be viewed as an extension of Gini’s algorithm, which was
proposed for single carrier systems.
This letter is organized as follows. Section II describes our
model for the received OFDM signals. In Section III, we pro-
pose a blind estimator based on cyclic correlation of the received
signals. Section IV describes the performance of the proposed
estimator, and Section V contains our conclusions.
II. OFDM SYSTEM DESCRIPTION
An OFDM signal transmitted through a frequency-selective
fading channel can be expressed as
(1)

I. INTRODUCTION
where is the channel impulse response, and is the channel

B OTH DATA-AIDED and non-data-aided synchronization

methods have been proposed for orthogonal frequency
division multiplexing (OFDM) synchronization. Most OFDM
order. The transmitted signal is

(2)
synchronization algorithms use training symbols [1]–[3]. How-
ever, the use of training symbols is not bandwidth-efficient.
Therefore, non-data-aided algorithms are more desirable if we where is the transmitter pulse shaping filter, is the sub-
wish to avoid reducing the data rate. Generally, these kinds carrier number, is defined as , and ’s are the
of synchronization algorithms make use of the redundancy complex information symbols.
introduced by cyclic prefixes [4]. At the receiver, the timing offset is modeled as a delay in the
The scheme for blind joint estimation of symbol timing and received signal, and the frequency offset is modeled as a phase
frequency offset in single carrier systems was first proposed by distortion of the received data in the time domain. These two
Gini [5]. That estimator makes use of the cyclostationarity of the uncertainties and the additive white Gaussian noise yield the
received signals. For multicarrier applications, Bolcskei intro- received signal
duced the blind algorithm for estimating symbol timing and fre-
quency offset [6]. However, Bolcskei’s algorithm requires that (3)
the channel impulse response be known. where is the integer-valued unknown arrival time of a
In this letter, we propose a non-data-aided synchronization symbol, is the frequency offset, and is the initial phase.
algorithm for the estimation of symbol-timing and carrier For the sake of simplicity, the following points are assumed
frequency offset. This synchronization algorithm exploits in this letter.
the second-order cyclostationarity of entire received OFDM
• is a zero-mean independent and identically distributed
signals. No channel status information is required to estimate
(i.i.d.) sequence with values drawn from a finite-alphabet
the symbol timing and frequency offset. Our approach can
complex constellation, with variance .
• For , each is zero-mean independent
Manuscript received November 14, 2002; revised February 6, 2003. This Gaussian random variable with variance .
work was supported by the Basic Research Program of the Korea Science and
Engineering Foundation under Grant R01-2000-000-00271-0(2002). The asso- • is uncorrelated with and .
ciate editor coordinating the review of this manuscript and approving it for pub-
lication was Dr. Monir Ghogho.
The authors are with the Information and Telecommunications Laboratory,
III. BLIND SYNCHRONIZATION ALGORITHM
Department of Electrical and Electronics Engineering, Yonsei University, Seoul The goal of synchronization is to estimate and . The
120-749, Korea (e-mail: mgballs@itl.yonsei.ac.kr; hscheon@itl.yonsei.ac.kr;
silver@itl.yonsei.ac.kr; cekang@itl.yonsei.ac.kr; daesikh@itl.yonsei.ac.kr). algorithm we are proposing is based on the cyclostationarity of
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/LSP.2003.819347 the received OFDM signals caused by the pulse-shaping filter.
1070-9908/04$20.00 © 2004 IEEE
84 IEEE SIGNAL PROCESSING LETTERS, VOL. 11, NO.2, FEBRUARY 2004

To ascertain the cyclostationarity of the received signal, we must

derive the time-varying correlation of the received signal

(4)

where is variance of and .

For a fixed , is periodic in with period . Thus, it
has cyclostationarity with period and discrete Fourier series
coefficients, which is called cyclic correlation. From (4), the
cyclic correlation turns out to be

Fig. 1. MSE for symbol-timing estimator in multipath fading channel.

(5) To avoid the effects of noise, let us consider only cases where
. For , we can retrieve from the cyclic correlation
phase shown in (8) as follows:
where .
To show the dependence of on the time for (9)
delay which was absorbed in , we can rewrite
using Parseval’s theorem
Given timing offset , the frequency offset can be derived
as

(10)

(6) Since we cannot have access to ensemble cyclic quantity, we

must estimate it from finite data samples. We obtain
from the dataset . If the number of data is large
where denotes Fourier transform of . enough, then should be asymptotically unbiased and
Let . consistent in a mean-square sense, i.e.,
Inserting (6) into (5), then we obtain . As a consequence, the estimator of and is asymp-
totically unbiased and consistent in the mean-square sense.
The effect of imperfection in cyclic correlation can poten-
tially be reduced by averaging. However, there is a trade-off
involved in the selection of averaging number. The most rea-
(7) sonable value may be selected by simulations so as to minimize
the complexity and mean-square error (MSE) of the estimator.
The effect of can be compensated for by multi-
plying with (7). Once we have defined IV. SIMULATION RESULTS
, we can rewrite (7) as
We conducted Monte Carlo simulations to evaluate the per-
formance of the estimators. We considered OFDM system with
64 subcarriers and used a raised cosine pulse filter for the trans-
mitter pulse-shaping filter in the simulations. We evaluated the
(8) performance of the estimator by means of the MSE, and we
compared the performance of the proposed estimator with that
As seen in (8), the timing offset and frequency offset ap- of Bolcskei’s.
pear as cyclic correlation phase, and the channel impulse re- Fig. 1 shows the MSE of the symbol-timing estimator versus
sponse does not affect the cyclic correlation phase. There- the SNR as the frequency offset increases. As mentioned
fore, no channel information is required for the proposed esti- above, it is observed that the MSE of the proposed symbol-
mator. Moreover, since frequency offset appears as the phase of timing estimator is almost equal irrespective of the frequency
cyclic correlation with respect to the lag , frequency offset has offset, and the symbol-timing estimator is hardly affected by the
no influence on the timing estimator. noise.
PARK et al.: BLIND OFDM SYNCHRONIZATION ALGORITHM 85

the proposed synchronization algorithm is better suited for the

initial synchronization of OFDM systems over fading channels.

V. CONCLUSION
We presented a blind estimation algorithm for symbol timing
and frequency offset for use in OFDM systems. The proposed
estimator uses cyclic correlation of the received OFDM signal.
Because it is a blind estimator, channel status information and
training symbols are not required. Simulation results show
that the proposed estimator demonstrates almost the same
performance as Bolcskei’s estimator, which requires the use of
channel information.

Fig. 2. MSE for frequency offset estimator in multipath fading channel.
The MSE for the frequency offset estimator is depicted in
Fig. 2. As seen in the figure, the MSE is not varying with the
SNR. Therefore, more reliable estimation can be achieved in-
dependent of SNR. However, the performance of the frequency
offset estimator is degraded in relation to the frequency offset.
The simulation results clearly show that the MSE per-
formance of the proposed estimator is close to the MSE
performance for Bolcskei’s estimator as proposed in [6].
However, the estimator proposed here requires no channel
information, whereas Bolcskei’s estimator does. Therefore,
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