Cyclic-Auto-Correlation Based Timing Estimation Algorithm for Time-Frequency Overlapping Multi-Carrier Signals

In recent years, the time-frequency overlapping multi-carrier signal has been a novel and valuable topic in blind signal processing, especially in the non-cooperative receiving field. But there is little related research in public published papers. This paper proposes two timing estimation algorithms, which are non-data-aided and based on the cyclic auto-correlation function. In order to evaluate the performance of the proposed algorithms, the theoretical bound of the timing estimation is derived. According to the analyses and simulation results, the effectiveness of the proposed algorithms has been demonstrated. It shows that Method I has better performance than Method II. However, Method II does not need prior information, so it has a wider range of applications.