Blind symbol timing synchronization scheme for real-time industrial wireless control network using high-speed preambleless OFDM systems over multipath fading channels

An accurate estimation of symbol timing is crucial for orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) demodulation, since synchronization errors might destroy the orthogonality among all subcarriers and have greater impact on the system performance than single carrier systems. The symbol timing offset (STO) that leads to inter-symbol interference (ISI) and inter-channel interference (ICI) must be avoided as much as possible. In this paper, a novel symbol timing synchronization algorithm is proposed for OFDM systems on the basis of cyclic prefix (CP). A metric function and a positioning function have been designed by taking advantage of the correlation properties of OFDM signals. Computer simulations demonstrate that the schemes are superior because they achieve accurate timing offset estimation with smaller standard deviation (SD) and relatively lower computational complexity compared with the existing methods based on CP under high signal-noise ratio (SNR) assumption over frequency-selective channels, which can meet the real-time requirements in wireless local area network (WLAN) environments for factory automation (FA).