IEEE COMMUNICATIONS LETTERS, VOL. 15, NO.

9, SEPTEMBER 2011

971

Blind Carrier Frequency Offset Estimation for OFDM Systems with Constant Modulus Constellations
Jun-Han Oh, Jin-Goog Kim, and Jong-Tae Lim

AbstractThis paper proposes a blind carrier frequency offset (CFO) estimation scheme for OFDM systems. In the proposed scheme, the covariance matrix of the received signal is obtained through the circular shifts of OFDM blocks in the time-domain. From the fact that the covariance matrix has a banded structure in the absence of CFO, we estimate CFO through minimizing the powers of the elements that are outside the band. We show that the proposed scheme is better than the conventional schemes through simulations. Index TermsOrthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM), carrier frequency offset (CFO), blind estimation.

II. S YSTEM D ESCRIPTION We consider a discrete time OFDM system with subcarriers. Let the transmitted signal of the -th OFDM block with , , CM constellations be denoted by X = [0 1 ] . We assume that the element for = 0, , 1 has unit 2 power, i.e., = 1. Then, the -point IDFT is applied to the transmitted signal X to generate the OFDM signal. After adding a guard interval of length larger than the maximum resolvable path to eliminate inter symbol interference (ISI), the OFDM signal is passed through the -path channel. After sampling and removing the guard interval , the demodulation is performed by computing the DFT of the received signal. The received time-domain samples vector r = [0 , , 1 ] with CFO is expressed as 1 2(+ ) C() H F X + W , (1) r =
=0

I. I NTRODUCTION RTHOGONAL frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) systems are very sensitive to carrier frequency offset (CFO), which results in inter-carrier interference (ICI) and deterioration of performance [1]. Therefore, the estimation and compensation of CFO have to be performed prior the fast Fourier transform (FFT). To preserve the bandwidth efciency, blind CFO estimation schemes have been proposed for the continuous transmission systems such as DVB and DVB [2]. In [2], the kurtosis-type cost function is proposed by exploiting non-gaussianity of the received signal. Likewise, the variance scheme to exploit the interference between subcarriers is used to set up the cost function, which is the same as the kurtosis-type cost function [3]. To overcome the drawback of the kurtosis-type cost function in multi-path channels, the spectrum-smoothing (SPS) scheme which uses similarity of the frequency response between two adjacent subcarriers has been proposed [4], [5]. In [6], the powers of the non-diagonal elements are used as the cost function based on the diagonality criterion. However, the scheme in [6] requires a large number of OFDM blocks and the schemes in [4], [5] suffer from performance degradation in severe frequency selective channels. In this paper, with constant modulus (CM) constellations, we propose a blind CFO estimation scheme by using the circular shifts of OFDM blocks. The proposed scheme uses the covariance matrix calculated by the circular shifts of the received signal. From the banded structure of the covariance matrix in the absence of CFO, we obtain the estimate of CFO through minimizing the powers outside the band. Through simulations, we demonstrate that the proposed estimation scheme outperforms the conventional methods.
Manuscript received May 7, 2011. The Associate editor coordinating the review of this letter and approving it for publication was Y.-C. Wu. This work was supported by NRRC for robot intelligence technology. The authors are with the Dept. of EECS, KAIST, 373-1, Guseong-dong, Yuseong-gu, Daejeon, 305-701, Korea (e-mail: jtlim@stcon.kaist.ac.kr). Digital Object Identier 10.1109/LCOMM.2011.070711.110955

where F denotes the -point DFT matrix, () means the complex conjugate transpose of (), W is AWGN with 2 , and [0.5, 0.5) is the normalized CFO. H variance is shown as D P where D is the diagonal matrix whose diagonal elements are same and equal to the -th channel impulse response and P is the permutation matrix which shifts the columns to the left respectively. C() is the diagonal 2 (1) matrix whose (, )-element is . III. CFO ESTIMATION Let the estimate of CFO be denoted by . Then, the ), which represents the compensation is performed with C ( complex conjugate of C( ), before DFT to the received samples r . From (1), the compensated received vector v = [0 , , 1 ] is shown as1 2 ( ) C( ) H F X + C ( )W . (2) v =
=0

To obtain the covariance matrix, we use the permutation matrix P which makes the compensated vector v circularly symmetric. As a result of -time shifts, the sample covariance matrix is calculated as 1 ( ) = U (U ) , (3) where U = [v , Pv , , P 1 v ]. To check the insight of the above covariance, assume that CFO is perfectly estimated and compensated. Then, the above covariance is expressed as =
1 =0

1 =0

H + e ,

(4)

where e is the error due to the noise W . With perfect CFO estimate, the above expression results from the unit power

c 2011 IEEE 1089-7798/11$25.00

972

IEEE COMMUNICATIONS LETTERS, VOL. 15, NO. 9, SEPTEMBER 2011

of the transmitted signal and the circulant property of the channel matrix. The proof is shown in Appendix A. The proposed method also needs the covariance matrix like [6]. However, the proposed scheme obtains the covariance matrix through the circular shift of the time-domain received samples with a few OFDM blocks. Thus, the covariance matrix of the received samples can be calculated without time-average which requires a large number of OFDM blocks. Since the 1 channel matrix =0 H has banded structure, the covariance matrix has also banded structure. From the special structure of the covariance matrix, we can construct the cost function ( ), which represents the powers of elements outside the band. Thus, the cost function ( ) is expressed as ( ) =
1 =0

10 10 MSE 10 10 10

MSE performance of CFO estimation (Nb=2)

diagonality kurtosis PDE proposed proposed (search) 5 10 15 SNR 20 25 30 35

10 10 MSE 10 10

MSE performance of CFO estimation (Nb=6)

( ) M2 ,

[0.5, 0.5)

(5)

10

diagonality kurtosis PDE proposed proposed (search) 5 10 15 SNR 20 25 30 35

where is the number of OFDM blocks, X is the frobenius norm of X, represents the hadamard product, and M represents the matrix whose elements outside the band are 1 and elements inside the band are 0. Then, the optimal estimate of CFO, , is obtained through minimizing the cost function ( ) by the exhaustive line search as in [2], [4]. The exhaustive line search needs heavy computational complexity. To avoid the exhaustive line search, we use the curve tting method by approximating the proposed cost function as follow: ( ) cos(2 ( )) + . (6)

Fig. 1. MSE performance of CFO estimation schemes with zero doppler frequency.
MSE performance of CFO estimation with 50Hz doppler frequency

10

10 MSE

10

diagonality kurtosis PDE proposed 5 10 15 SNR 20 25 30 35

Since the coefcients and are independent of , we can obtain by tting the cosine function in (6). Note that the above approximation becomes ( ) = cos(2 ( )) without the noise. The proof is given in Appendix B. As reported in [4], by calculating ( ) at three points = 1/4, 0, 1/4, the estimate of CFO is obtained from 1 -1 0 2 tan (/), 1 1 tan ( / ) + 0 . 5 , 0, 0 (7) = 21 tan-1 (/) 0.5, 0, < 0
2

10

10

MSE performance of CFO estimation with 200Hz doppler frequency

10 MSE

10

diagonality kurtosis PDE proposed 5 10 15 SNR 20 25 30 35

10

where = ( (1/4)+ (1/4))/2 (0) and = ( (1/4) (1/4))/2. IV. S IMULATION In the simulation, an OFDM system is considered with 64 subcarriers and length of cyclic prex 16. The transmitted signal is modulated using QPSK constellation. To show the performance, we consider the channel generated by Jakes model. / 2 The power prole is assumed as [ ] = 1 / , = =0 0, , 1 with = 9. Through 2000 estimations and averaging them, we obtain the MSE performance. Figure 1 shows the MSE performance of the CFO estimation schemes with zero doppler frequency. In Fig. 1, we can observe that the diagonality scheme has an error oor at all considered SNR. This is because the covariance matrix of the transmitted signals in the diagonal scheme cannot be regarded as the identity matrix at = 2, 6. The calculated covariance matrix does not satisfy the diagonality condition even if CFO is perfectly compensated. Also, since the received signal is closer to gaussian if the CFO is compensated perfectly, the kurtosis scheme shows the error oor at high SNR as shown in [4], [5]. Moreover, although the PDE scheme shows no error oor, the

Fig. 2. MSE performance of CFO estimation schemes with various doppler frequencies.

performance of the proposed scheme is slightly better. Figure 3 shows the MSE performance in mobile channels. As shown in Fig. 2, the proposed scheme shows better performance than all other schemes at 50Hz and 200Hz doppler frequencies. Also, the estimation through the curve tting of the cost function shows a similar performance to the exhaustive line search. The proposed scheme can be adopted for LP-OFDM by choosing an appropriate LP. We demonstrate the better performance of the proposed scheme compared to the scheme in [8] because the scheme in [8] has the irreducible estimation error due to the sample average. In the proposed scheme, since the covariance matrix is circulant, we perform the estimation through the 1 row vector. Thus, the cost function () is calculated by 1 1 () = =0 2 2 =1 2 0 2 where represents the -th element of the rst row of the covariance 1 1 matrix. Moreover, since =0 2 = =0 4 with the frequency-domain received sample , we calculate

OH et al.: BLIND CARRIER FREQUENCY OFFSET ESTIMATION FOR OFDM SYSTEMS WITH CONSTANT MODULUS CONSTELLATIONS

973

elements of the covariance matrix. Since , the total complexity for the estimation is ( ) which is the similar to the PDE scheme. V. C ONCLUSION In this paper, we propose a CFO estimation scheme for OFDM systems with CM constellations. From the fact that the covariance matrix obtained by the circular shifts of the received signal has banded structure with perfect CFO compensation, we construct the cost function to obtain the estimate of CFO. Also, to reduce the computational complexity, we approximate the cost function as a cosine function. Through simulations, we present the MSE performance of the proposed scheme compared to the kurtosis, PDE, and the diagonality schemes. A PPENDIX A D ERIVATION OF (4) From now on, we omit the index for notational convenience. With assumption that the transmitted signal X has a unit power and the CFO is perfectly compensated, the covariance matrix through the circular shifts of the received signal can be expressed as
1 1 1 = 1 P H F XX F H (P ) + e =0 =0 =0

the time-domain received samples withwhere represents 1 1 out CFO, = =0 ( =0 + , +) , = and = . From the above equation, the power, 1,+1 2 , is expressed as 1,+1 2
= 4( 2 + Re{ })sin2 ( ) +4Im{ }cos( )sin( ) + 2 ( ) 2 = 2 + Re{ } cos(2 ) }sin(2 ) + 2Im{ 2

(12)

(8)

From the circulant property of the channel matrix and permutation matrix P, (8) is rewritten as
1 1 1 = 1 H P F XX F(P ) H + e =0 =0 =0 T

where = + 2( 2 + Re{ }). Re{} and Im{} represent the real part and the imaginary part of {} re spectively. To obtain (12), we use the fact that = 2 Im{ }cos( ) + 2 Re{ }sin( ), cos2 ( ) = (1 cos(2 ))/2 and sin( )cos( ) = sin(2 )/2. Moreover, since for < + 1 represents the element of the covariance matrix without CFO, it can be approximated as zero at high SNR, the cost function of (5) is approximated as cos(2 ) + . Furthermore, if the OFDM system is noise-free, for < + 1 which is the (1, +1)-th element of CFO-free covariance matrix is zero from (4). As it follows from (12), it is obvious that = . Thus, the cost function ( ) can be expressed as cos(2 ) without any approximation.

R EFERENCES
[1] L. Rugini and P. Banelli, BER of OFDM systems impaired by carrier frequency offset in multipath fading channels, IEEE Trans. Wireless Commun., vol. 4, no. 5, pp. 2279-2288, Sep. 2005. [2] Y. Yao and G. B. Giannakis, Blind carrier frequency offset estimation in SISO, MIMO, and multiuser OFDM systems, IEEE Trans. Commun., vol. 53, no. 1, pp. 173-183, Jan. 2005. [3] A. J. Al-Dweik, Robust non data-aided frequency offset estimation technique, in Proc. 15th IEEE Int. Symp. Personal, Indoor Mobile Radio Commun., vol. 2, pp. 1365-1369, Sep. 2004. [4] X. N. Zeng and A. Ghrayeb, A blind carrier frequency offset estimation scheme for OFDM systems with constant modulus signaling, IEEE Trans. Commun., vol. 56, no. 7, pp. 1032-1037, July 2008. [5] L. Wu, X. D Zhang, P. S. Li, and Y. T. Su, A blind CFO estimator based on smoothing power spectrum for OFDM systems, IEEE Trans. Commun., vol. 57, no. 7, pp. 1924-1927, July 2009. [6] T. Roman, S. Visuri, and V. Koivunen, Blind frequency synchronization in OFDM via diagonality criterion, IEEE Trans. Signal Process., vol. 54, no. 8, pp. 3125-3135, Aug. 2006. [7] A. Al-Dweik, A. Hazmi, Y. Sedki, B. Sharif, and C. Tsimenidis, Carrier frequency offset estimation for OFDM systems over mobile radio channels, IEEE Trans. Veh. Technol., vol. 59, no. 2, pp. 974-979, Feb. 2010. [8] M. Movahhedian, Y. Ma, and R. Tafazolli, Blind CFO estimation for LP-OFDMA, IEEE Trans. Signal Process., vol. 58, no. 9, pp. 46984710, Sep. 2010.

(9)

The (, )-th element , of the matrix T is , = = =

1 1 =0 1 =0 1 =0

21

1 2 =0

22 (+)

2()

1 =0

2()

, = 0, otherwise

(10)

Hence, the covariance matrix with = 0 is the same as (4). A PPENDIX B D ERIVATION OF (6) The calculated covariance matrix is circulant due to the circular shifts. Thus, the cost function of (5) is obtained through calculating only the rst row of the covariance matrix. To prove the approximation of (6), we start from the (1, +1)th element 1,+1 of the covariance matrix. 1,+1 = =
1 =0 1

2(+)

( +)

=0 1 ( =0

( +)
2( )

+
2(/2+)

2 sin( )

(11)