Improved time and frequency synchronization in presence of imperfect channel state information

This paper addresses altogether time and frequency synchronization in IEEE 802.11a orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) wireless communication systems. The proposed algorithms have two main features: (i) they make use of an additional source of information available at IEEE 802.11a physical layer, on top of the usual ones typically adopted for synchronization such as training sequences. This additional source of information is provided by the higher layers of the communication protocol. In fact, when the carrier sense multiple access with collision avoidance (CSMA/CA) protocol is activated, the receiver is able to predict some parts of the SIGNAL field that are classically assumed unknown. Moreover, during the negotiation of the transmission medium reservation, the exchanged frames not only help the receiver to predict the SIGNAL field but also to obtain information about the channel state. (ii) Based on this property, we propose a joint MAP time and frequency synchronization algorithm using all available information. Finally, the time synchronization is fine tuned by means of a specific metric in the frequency domain that allows us to minimize the expectation of the transmission error function over all channel estimate errors. Simulation results compliant with the IEEE 802.11a standard in both indoor and outdoor environments show that the proposed algorithm drastically improves the performance in terms of synchronization failure probability and bit error ratio, compared to state-of-the-art algorithms.