Frequency offset acquisition based on subcarrier differential detection for OFDM communications on doubly-selective fading channels

An effective frequency offset acquisition technique based on differential detection for wireless orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) communication is investigated in this paper. By taking advantage of differentially coherent detection, data-aided frequency acquisition assisted by frequency-domain pseudo-noise (PN) matched filters (MF's) can achieve lower probabilities of false alarm and miss over a propagation channel with a wide enough coherence bandwidth than its non-coherent counterpart can. Furthermore, the proposed technique can also function very well over a severely frequency-selective fading channel while the subcarrier-level differential detection is exploited. Extensive computer simulations verified the superiority of the proposed technique.