An EM-based semi-blind estimation of carrier frequency offset for burst transmission

In this paper, we devoted to semi-blind carrier frequency offset estimation for burst-mode transmission on the AWGN channel. Based on the framework of the well-known expectation-maximization (EM) algorithm, in addition to the uses of known pilot symbols, the proposed semi-blind estimation (SBE) algorithm jointly exploits the a posteriori information of the unknown data symbols which were referred to as the missing vector. Compared with the pilot-aided maximum-likelihood (ML) estimation, the performance of the estimation can be improved effectively without increasing the number of pilot symbols with the SBE algorithm. Simulation results are presented to verify the rationality of the SBE in terms of the mean square error (MSE), while it also shows that the performance can reach the CRLB at moderately high signal-to-noise ratios (SNR).