Independent Component Analysis for Carrier Synchronization in OFDM Systems

To overcome the inter-carrier interference (ICI) of orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) systems due to the carrier frequency offset (CFO), an ICA-based carrier synchronization method is proposed. Independent component analysis (ICA) is also known as blind source separation (BSS), which depends on the independence of source signals to separate or extract latent signals of interest. In this paper, we build an analogous ICA model for OFDM systems with the CFO. By virtue of this model, the ICA technique can be utilized to compensate corresponding loss of performance due to imperfect CFO estimation in the conventional method. Theoretical analysis shows that the ICA-based carrier synchronization method not only has maximum likelihood (ML) source recovery ability, but also can improve signal to noise ratio (SNR) of OFDM systems. Simulation results demonstrate the validity of the proposed method.