This document summarizes a pilot-assisted frequency synchronization technique for wireless OFDM systems over fast fading channels. It presents the following key points:
1) Pilot tones embedded in the downlink signal are used by mobile receivers to synchronize to the base station's timing reference through an approximate maximum likelihood frequency offset estimator.
2) Multiple pilot tones are used to overcome the effect of frequency selective fading across the signal bandwidth.
3) In the "loop timing" method, each mobile first synchronizes to the downlink and then derives its uplink timing from the recovered downlink clock.
This document summarizes a pilot-assisted frequency synchronization technique for wireless OFDM systems over fast fading channels. It presents the following key points:
1) Pilot tones embedded in the downlink signal are used by mobile receivers to synchronize to the base station's timing reference through an approximate maximum likelihood frequency offset estimator.
2) Multiple pilot tones are used to overcome the effect of frequency selective fading across the signal bandwidth.
3) In the "loop timing" method, each mobile first synchronizes to the downlink and then derives its uplink timing from the recovered downlink clock.
This document summarizes a pilot-assisted frequency synchronization technique for wireless OFDM systems over fast fading channels. It presents the following key points:
1) Pilot tones embedded in the downlink signal are used by mobile receivers to synchronize to the base station's timing reference through an approximate maximum likelihood frequency offset estimator.
2) Multiple pilot tones are used to overcome the effect of frequency selective fading across the signal bandwidth.
3) In the "loop timing" method, each mobile first synchronizes to the downlink and then derives its uplink timing from the recovered downlink clock.
This document summarizes a pilot-assisted frequency synchronization technique for wireless OFDM systems over fast fading channels. It presents the following key points:
1) Pilot tones embedded in the downlink signal are used by mobile receivers to synchronize to the base station's timing reference through an approximate maximum likelihood frequency offset estimator.
2) Multiple pilot tones are used to overcome the effect of frequency selective fading across the signal bandwidth.
3) In the "loop timing" method, each mobile first synchronizes to the downlink and then derives its uplink timing from the recovered downlink clock.
Proceedings of 48th Vehicular Technology Conference (VTC98), Ottawa, Canada, May 1998
PILOT ASSISTED SYNCHRONIZATION FOR WIRELESS OFDMSYSTEMS OVER FAST
TIME VARYINGFADING CHANNELS Samir Kapoor, Daniel J. Marchok Tellabs Research Center Mishawaka, IN 46545 Yih-Fang Huang University of Notre Dame Notre Dame, IN 46556 ABSTRACT This paper presents a frequency synchronization technique for wireless OFDM communication systems over fast time varying channels. The overall method, known as loop-timing, can be used to synchronize multiple mobile transceivers with a base-station. In this method, the mobiles rst achieve downlink synchronization and subsequently derive their up- link timing reference from the recovered downlink clock. To accomplish the former task, a periodic time-frequency pattern of pilot tones is embedded in the transmitted down- link baseband signal. Frequency offsets are estimated and compensated using an approximate maximumlikelihood fre- quency offset estimator. The method can be used to correct for frequency offsets up to half the OFDM symbol rate and is suitable for real time implementation. I. INTRODUCTION Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) has recently emerged as an attractive alternative to conventional modulation and multiple access schemes for wireless com- munications [1]. Potential applications include next genera- tion wireless local loop, wireless local area networks and cellular and PCS systems [5]. The development of fast, accurate, and reliable synchronization algorithms for wire- less OFDM systems is a critical and challenging problem with signicant impact on overall system design and per- formance [2, 5, 6, 8]. This paper presents a pilot-assisted technique for synchronization of mobile transceivers with a centralized base-station over fast time varying fading chan- nels. For instance, this method may be used for synchroniz- ing multiple mobiles with a single base-station in cellular orthogonal frequency division multiple access (OFDMA) systems. Figure 1 depicts a schematic diagram of the base-station and mobile OFDM transceivers with emphasis on the syn- chronization sub-system. The proposed method utilizes pilot- tones embedded in the baseband OFDM signal which are used by the mobile receiver to lock-on to the base-stations timing reference. OFDM tones are also referred to as sub- symbols, sub-carriers or bins in the literature. As is cus- tomary, a cyclic-prex (or guard time) is appended to all symbols to preserve orthogonality between sub-carriers and simplify equalization [1, 8]. A key distinguishing feature of a pilot sub-symbol is that it is modulated with a constant pre-determined sub-symbol at all times. Also, its spectral location (or bin number) is chosen such that the pilot-tone waveformhas as close to an integer number of periods in the duration of the cyclic-prex as possible. This ensures that the pilot-tone appears as a phase-continuous waveform to the remote transceiver irrespective of its time domain sym- bol alignment with the base-station. A frequency acquisition and tracking procedure com- prising of all-digital baseband algorithms is developed us- ing the method of loop timing. The proposed method is not only robust but also incurs low bandwidth overhead. To overcome the effect of frequency selective fades across the entire signal bandwidth, multiple pilot tones are used. The inter-pilot frequency spacing is chosen commensurate with the coherence bandwidth of the channel and the allowable bandwidth overhead. In the loop timing method, each mo- bile transceiver rst synchronizes itself to the base-station and then derives its uplink transmitter timing reference from the recovered downlink clock. Each mobile transceiver has a local timing reference, usually derived from a Voltage Controlled Crystal Oscillator (VCXO) which provides the timing reference for the receiver A/D, transmitter D/A and all radio frequency (RF) circuitry. Frequency offsets be- tween the receive and transmit symbol clock occur due to non-idealities in the remote transceiver VCXOs, possibly of the order of several parts-per-million (ppm). When time- invariant channels are encountered, each data modulated tone in a OFDM signal is exactly orthogonal to all other tones. However, transmission over fast time varying channels di- minishes the orthogonality leading to inter-channel inter- ference (ICI). Other ICI causing factors include phase noise and jitter. To achieve downlink frequencysynchronization, the mo- bile receiver constructs a frequency offset estimator using the set of embedded pilot-tones in the received baseband signal. This algorithm also maintains synchronization dur- Proceedings of 48th Vehicular Technology Conference (VTC98), Ottawa, Canada, May 1998 Base Station Transceiver RF to baseband conversion RF conversion Baseband to Base Station Timing Reference RF to baseband conversion RF conversion Baseband to Loop timed VCXO Timing Reference Mobile Transceiver D/A A/D D/A A/D Figure 1: Schematic diagram of synchronization sub-system in a wireless OFDM base-station and mobile transceiver. ing steady-state operation in tracking mode. Note that the use of conventional phase locked loops for frequency ac- quisition and tracking is precluded by the fast time-varying nature of the channel. II. FREQUENCY OFFSET ESTIMATION Consider a discrete time OFDM system model in which orthogonal sinusoids are transmitted each symbol time. Thus, the complex baseband transmitted signal at the th symbol time is given by (2.1) where ; is the th frequency domain sub- symbol during the th symbol time typically selected from a quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM) constellation; is the time index and denotes the set of sub-channel indices being used for data transmission. With a sample rate , as- sume that each user encounters a time-selective multipath fading channel impulse response (CIR) spanning a maxi- mum duration . Also, it is assumed that the the cyclic prex is chosen to be of length samples such that , i.e. . For typical wireless chan- nels, the coherence bandwidth far exceeds the OFDM sub- channel frequency spacing. Thus, each sub-channel experi- ences at fading. The received signal after passing through the channel is given by, (2.2) where denotes the CIR at time due to the impulse . Note that slowly time-varying channels may be considered to be time-invariant over a symbol period lead- ing to . Using (2.1) in (2.2), the received signal is given by (2.3) where denotes discrete-time AWGNsamples with vari- ance . At the receiver, cyclic prex samples are discarded before demodulation and it is sufcient to consider each symbol independently. Consider now the demodulation of a pilot sub-symbol with a frequency offset. Assuming that the frequency offset between the received and transmitted base- band signals is Hz, let the normalized frequency offset be given by where the inter-channel spacing . It is also assumed that a total of bins, indexed by , are allocated to be pilot tone bins. Thus, the th demodulated pilot tone is given by (2.4) for and where denotes a random phase offset accumulated over the previous ( ) symbols due to the frequency offset. The time index on is dropped be- cause the pilot sub-symbols are constant for every symbol. and denote the channel attenuation and additive ICI for the th bin during the th symbol respectively as, Proceedings of 48th Vehicular Technology Conference (VTC98), Ottawa, Canada, May 1998 Each demodulated sub-symbol is nowcorrupted by ICI from all other sub-symbols. Similarly, for the next symbol, where for notational convenience, First consider time-invariant (or slowly time-varying) chan- nels for which . Thus, in this case, (2.5) Using only the th pilot tone, an estimate for is now con- structed using a block of symbols as, (2.6) Similar approaches with differing time-frequency congu- rations of pilots have also been suggested in [5]-[8]. Using all the pilots simultaneously, (2.7) Other combining methods, such as selection combining, may also be used. With appropriate assumptions on the additive noise and ICI, (2.6) is an approximate maximum likelihood estimate (AMLE) of . The proof follows along the lines of [4, 7]. The approximation comes from two factors - the time-varying nature of the CIR and statistical assumptions on the additive noise and ICI. Considering the th pilot tone, let Using (2.5), we have Denoting the MLE for as To derive the MLE, conventional assumptions are made on the post-demodulation noise and ICI. Namely, they are as- sumed to be instances of stationary, ergodic zero-mean com- plex valued processes. The mean of is and can be factored out into a product of partial densities. Thus, can be obtained by maximizing the log-likelihood function according to Differentiating with respect to and setting to zero yields Observing that the right hand side is merely the complex conjugate of the left-hand side, the imaginary part may be set to zero yielding (2.6). It can be also be shown that the estimator for in (2.6) is unbi- ased and asymptotically consistent. Consider now the auto- correlation between the channel attenuation of successive pilot sub-symbols for a time-varying channel. Assume a wide-sense stationary uncorrelated scattering (WSSUS) fad- ing model and a Rayleigh fading Doppler spectrum of the form [3], where is the maximum Doppler frequency of the re- ceived signal. Thus, where denotes the zeroth order Bessel function; and for . The frequency-offset estimate at each symbol time is suitably scaled to provide control signals to the local VCXO. In order to uniquely ascertain the signed frequency offset (in Hz) from the normalized offset , it is necessary that For example, with a symbol rate of 8 KHz, baseband fre- quency offsets up to 4 KHz can be unambiguously esti- mated and corrected. For systems with large-scale initial frequency offsets, search procedures are typically deployed prior to acquisition. Instead of block updates, the AMLE can also be readily updated recursively to provide a control signal to the VCXO each symbol time for steady state frequency tracking. The argument of the inverse tangent function in (2.6) is updated each symbol time over a sliding window of previous sym- bols while is computed each symbol time using (2.6) and (2.7). Proceedings of 48th Vehicular Technology Conference (VTC98), Ottawa, Canada, May 1998 0 20 40 60 80 100 120 140 160 180 200 0.95 0.955 0.96 0.965 0.97 0.975 0.98 0.985 0.99 0.995 1 Doppler frequency (Hz) N = 128 N = 256 N = 512 Figure 2: Auto-correlation of channel fading coefcient be- tween successive OFDM symbols. III. SIMULATION RESULTS Figure 2 plots the auto-correlation between the fading co- efcients for successive OFDM pilot sub-symbols ( ) and for = 128, 256 and 512 and symbol rates of = 16 KHz, 8 KHz and 4 KHz respectively. This results in the same data rate and occupied bandwidth for all three cases. For example, with QPSK sub-symbols, this yields a maxi- mum aggregate data rate of 4.096 Mb/s at the base-station. The cyclic prex is taken to be 10 long in each case. The performance of the AMLE algorithm is depicted in Figure 3. The mean error magnitude and the frequency offset esti- mation error standard deviation is plotted versus for SNR = 20 dB; = 10; Doppler spreads of 0, 50 and 100 Hz; = 256 and = 8 KHz. It is seen that frequency offsets can be reduced to a very small fraction of the symbol clock. IV. CONCLUSIONS This paper has described a frequencysynchronization method for wireless OFDMcommunication systems suitable for op- eration over fast time-varying channels. The method may be used to carry out downlink synchronization of mobile transceivers with a base-station. For this purpose, a time- frequency pattern of pilot tones is embedded in the down- link signal. An approximate maximumlikelihood algorithm is used to estimate and compensate for frequency offsets. The overall method, called loop timing, is suitable for real- time implementation for operation over fast time varying and frequency selective fading channels. 20 30 40 50 60 70 80 90 100 0 1 2 3 4 5 M e a n
e r r o r
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( H z ) fm = 100 Hz 50 Hz 0 Hz 20 30 40 50 60 70 80 90 100 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 L (symbols) E r r o r
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( H z ) 0 Hz 50 Hz 100 Hz Figure 3: Frequency offset estimate using the AMLE algo- rithm. V. REFERENCES [1] J. A. C. Bingham, Multicarrier Modulation: An idea whose time has come, IEEE Comm. Mag., pp. 5-14, May 1990. [2] J.K. Cavers, An Analysis of Pilot Symbol Assisted Modulation for Rayleigh Fading Channels, IEEE Trans. on Veh. Tech., Vol. 40, No. 4, pp. 686-693, Nov. 1991. [3] W. C. Jakes, Microwave Mobile Communication, IEEE Press, 1994. [4] F. Classen, H. Meyr and P. Sehier, Maximum likeli- hood open loop carrier synchronizer for digital radio, Proc. ICC93, pp. 493-497, 1993. [5] F. Classen and H. Meyr, Frequency synchronization algorithms for OFDM systems suitable for commu- nication over frequency selective fading channels, Proc. VTC94, pp. 1655-1659, Stockholm, June 1994. [6] M. Luise and R. Reggiannini, Carrier frequency ac- quisition and tracking for OFDM systems, IEEE Trans. Comm., pp. 1590-1598, November 1996. [7] P. Moose, A technique for OFDM frequency offset correction, IEEE Trans. Comm., pp. 2908-2914, Oc- tober 1994. [8] H. Sari, G. Karam and I. Jeanclaude, Channel equal- ization and carrier synchronization in OFDM sys- tems, in Audio and Video Digital Radio Broadcasting Systems and Techniques, R. Gaudenzi and M. Luise, Eds, Amsterdam: Elsevier, 1994.