Carrier Frequency Offset Estimation for Interleaved
OFDMA Uplink
Weile Zhang
†
, Feifei Gao
1,2
,QinyeYin
†
, and Huiming Wang
†
†
MOE Key Lab for Intelligent Networks and Network Security, Xi’an Jiaotong University, Xi’an, China
1
Tsinghua National Laboratory for Information Science and Technology, Beijing, China
2
National Mobile Communications Research Laboratory, Southeast University, Nanjing, China
wlzhang1984@gmail.com, feifeigao@ieee.org, qyyin@mail.xjtu.edu.cn, xjbswhm@gmail.com
Abstract—In this paper, we develop a new carrier frequency
offset (CFO) estimation scheme for interleaved orthogonal fre-
quency division multiple access (OFDMA) transmission. We em-
ploy multi-antenna at the receiver and exploit the rank reduction
approach to blindly estimate the CFOs of multiple users. The
proposed scheme supports full load transmission that allows
all sub-carriers being allocated to users, which is a significant
advantage over the existing schemes. Both performance analysis
and numerical results are provided to corroborate the proposed
studies.
I. INTRODUCTION
Orthogonal frequency division multiple access (OFDMA) is
a promising technique for next-generation multiuser wireless
communications [1]. However, the existence of multiple carrier
frequency offsets (CFOs) leads to both inter-carrier inter-
ference (ICI) and multiple-access interference (MAI), which
severely degrades the system performance.
Although the CFOs can be estimated by training se-
quences [2], [3] or embedded pilots [4], blind CFO estima-
tion methods were proposed to improve the bandwidth. A
frequency estimation scheme for interleaved uplink OFDMA
that exploits the periodic structure of the signals from each
user has been reported in [5], where the subspace estimation
theory was utilized, and the scheme is similar to the multiple
signal classification (MUSIC) technique [6]. Based on the
observation of [5], several advancements were proposed later.
For instance, [7] suggested to use the estimation of signal
parameters via rotational invariance technique (ESPRIT) [8],
achieving better performance as well as lower computational
complexity. The authors in [9] replaced the MUSIC approach
in [5] by a two-stage process where an initial coarse search
is conducted before the precise search step. This could reduce
the computational complexity to some extent. Another CFO
estimation scheme for interleaved OFDMA/space division
multiple access (SDMA) uplink systems was developed in
This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation
of China (NSFC) (No. 60971113 & 61172093), and the Foundation for
Innovative Research Groups of the NSFC (No. 60921003). The work of F. Gao
was supported by the open research fund of National Mobile Communications
Research Laboratory, Southeast University (No. 2011D02) and the Specialized
Research Fund for the Doctoral Program of Higher Education of China (No.
20110002120059).
[10] to support spatially separated users and to maximize
the channel throughput. The authors in [11] described a
CFO estimation scheme for single carrier interleaved FDMA
systems, aiming to improve the data throughput efficiency.
Despite their good performance, both [5] and its variations
[7]-[11] must reserve null subcarriers or a much longer cyclic
prefix (CP) to construct the noise space, which reduces the
bandwidth efficiency. To support full carrier-load transmission,
several schemes have been developed by deploying uniform
linear array (ULA) at the receiver [12]-[13]. However, these
schemes are only valid under the strict assumption that the
ULA at the receiver is elevated, and the transmitted signal of
each user is restricted to a single direction of arrival.
In this paper, we design a new subspace based multiuser
CFO estimation scheme for interleaved OFDMA transmission,
leveraging multi-antenna at the receiver. Exploiting the rank
reduction approach, we propose a blind method that can
estimate multiple CFOs individually. The proposed scheme
supports full carrier-load transmission, which is significantly
advantageous over those in [5]-[11]. Both performance anal-
ysis and simulations are provided to evaluated the proposed
method.
II. P
ROBLEM FORMULATION
Consider a multiuser OFDMA system with 𝐾 users, 𝑁
subcarriers, and 𝑀 antennas at the receiver. All subcarriers
are sequentially indexed with {𝑛}, 𝑛 =0, 1, ⋅⋅⋅ ,𝑁 − 1.
These subcarriers are equally divided into 𝑄 subchannels, each
having 𝑃 = 𝑁/𝑄 subcarriers, and the 𝑞th subchannel consists
of subcarriers with the index set {𝑞,𝑄+𝑞,⋅⋅⋅ , (𝑃 −1)𝑄+𝑞},
𝑞 =0, 1, ⋅⋅⋅ ,𝑄 − 1. Each subchannel will be exclusively
assigned to one user and, thus, no subchannel can be shared by
more than one users. Without loss of generality, we consider
only the case of 𝐾 = 𝑄 to simplify the illustration, i.e., the
system is fully loaded, whereas the designed scheme can be
straightforwardly extended to more general cases.
Assume the 𝑘th user occupies the 𝑞
(𝑘)
th subchannel and
let s
(𝑘)
𝑔
=
𝑠
(𝑘)
0,𝑔
,𝑠
(𝑘)
1,𝑔
, ⋅⋅⋅ ,𝑠
(𝑘)
𝑃 −1,𝑔
be the 𝑃 information
symbols of the 𝑘th user in the 𝑔th OFDMA block. The
overall OFDMA block of length 𝑁 can be represented by
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