Estimation of Channel Transfer Function and Carrier Frequency Offset for OFDM Systems With Phase Noise

The joint estimation of carrier frequency offset (CFO) and channel transfer function (CTF) for orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) systems with phase noise is discussed in this paper. A CFO estimation algorithm is developed by exploring the time-frequency structure of specially designed training symbols, and it provides a very accurate estimation of the CFO in the presence of both unknown frequency-selective fading and phase noise. Based on the estimated CFO, phase noise and frequency-selective fading are jointly estimated by employing the maximum a posteriori (MAP) criterion. Specifically, the fading channel is estimated in the form of the frequency-domain CTF. The estimation of the CTF eliminates the requirement of a priori knowledge of channel length, and it is simpler compared with the time-domain channel impulse response (CIR) estimation methods used in the literature. Theoretical analysis with the Cramer-Rao lower bound (CRLB) demonstrates that the proposed CFO and CTF estimation algorithms can achieve near-optimum performance.