An improved method for carrier frequency offset estimation based on FFT

Abstract

The estimation of carrier parameters is the key for coherent reception. FFT-based methods which have lower complexity, larger frequency regions and attractive performance have been widely used in practice. However, there is still much room for improvement for these traditional estimators. For example, the MSEs of traditional estimators would fluctuate dramatically while frequency varies, and they cannot adapt to higher SNR. Although iterative frequency estimator has attractive performance, it needs many times of iteration which would increase the computational complexity. An improved method is proposed in this paper. Simulation results indicate that better performance could be obtained by ingenious combination of traditional estimators.