Synchronization for NC-OFDM-based Cognitive Radio, robust against narrowband primary user

Abstract

This paper presents a preamble-based time and frequency synchronization algorithm for an NC-OFDM-based Cognitive Radio (CR) system. While keeping its computational complexity close to the commonly known, autocorrelation-based Schmidl&Cox algorithm, it is robust against narrowband interference (NBI), e.g. from Primary Users (PUs). Essentially, the proposed algorithm does not require to know any parameters of NBI. Simulations results confirm its usefulness even in the case of a real interference.