Joint frequency offset, time offset, and channel estimation for OFDM/OQAM systems

Among the multicarrier modulation techniques considered as an alternative to orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) for future wireless networks, a derivative of OFDM based on offset quadrature amplitude modulation (OFDM/OQAM) has received considerable attention. In this paper, we propose an improved joint estimation method for carrier frequency offset, sampling time offset, and channel impulse response, needed for the practical application of OFDM/OQAM. The proposed joint ML estimator instruments a pilot-based maximum-likelihood (ML) estimation of the unknown parameters, as derived under the assumptions of Gaussian noise and independent input symbols. The ML estimator formulation relies on the splitting of each received pilot symbol into contributions from surrounding pilot symbols, non-pilot symbols and additive noise. Within the ML framework, the Cramer-Rao bound on the covariance matrix of unbiased estimators of the joint parameter vector under consideration is derived as a performance benchmark. The proposed method is compared with a highly cited previous work. The improvements in the results point to the superiority of the proposed method, which also performs close to the Cramer-Rao bound.