CFO estimation schemes for differential OFDM systems

This paper proposes two blind carrier frequency offset (CFO) estimation schemes for differentially modulated orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) systems. The proposed schemes estimate the fractional part of the CFO with only two consecutive OFDM blocks, and they exploit two implicit properties associated with differentially modulated OFDM (DOFDM) systems, i.e., the channel keeps constant over two consecutive OFDM blocks, and the DOFDM systems employ an M-ary phase-shift keying constellation. One of the schemes is based on the finite alphabet (FA) constraint and the other one is based on the constant modulus (CM) constraint. They provide a trade-off between the performance and computational complexity. Furthermore, the FA based scheme can achieve better performance at high signal-to-noise ratios at the expense of some additional computational complexity as compared to the existing CM based subspace scheme. The constrained Cramer-Rao lower bound is also derived. Several numerical examples are presented to validate the efficacy of the proposed schemes.