Optimum Frame Synchronization for OFDM Systems

Orthogonal frequency division multiplexing has emerged as a promising air interface scheme for wireless broadband communications. For OFDM systems, frame synchronization has received much attention in the literature, though simple correlators are still widely used in real systems. In this letter, we present the analytical expression of the optimal frame synchronizer for OFDM systems. Frame synchronization is posed as a maximum a posteriori probability estimation. We show that the resulting frame synchronizer consists of a correlation term and a correction term. The correction term accounts for the random data surrounding a synchronization word. Numerical results show the performance gain of the proposed frame synchronizer over a correlation scheme.