Investigating The Effect of The Carrier Frequency Offset(CFO) and Frequency Synchronization on The Performance of The OFDM Wireless Systems

Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) is a modulation schema that due to the high spectral efficiency and the simplicity of the receiver implementation is the most common system for using in broadband communication systems. Although OFDM has been used in numerous wireless communication systems, but two of the main problems that are needed to be considered and investigated is Carrier Frequency Offset (CFO) and OFDM synchronization. CFO ruins the orthogonality between the subcarriers and creates Inter-Carrier Interference (ICI). In brief, CFO and lack of the frequency synchronization in OFDM systems can severely degrade the performance of the OFDM systems. In this paper we review and analyze the effect of the CFO and frequency synchronization in the OFDM systems, and propose an algorithm that can be used for CFO estimation.