Re: [Discuss-gnuradio] CFO in OFDM

[Martin Braun]

On 10/29/2014 01:34 PM, David Halls wrote:
> I am suffering from issues related to residual CFO error manifesting
> itself as a slight rotation over time. This can be partially corrected
> in the FD using tracking pilots which I have implemented but there is
> still a slight problem which may be caused by ICI.
> 
> In the OFDM example code, how is the value for the Frequency Mod
> sensitivity (-2/FFT_len) derived? Has anyone implemented other CFO
> estimation blocks for OFDM systems, other than the Schmidl and Cox
> technique?

I recommend the S&C paper for the derivation, but the maths is not that
hard. The very short version is that 1/fft_len is the frequency offset
of carriers in normalized frequency, and the fine frequency offset is
unambiguous between \pm 1 carrier. The result of the estimator is thus
in 'fraction of carriers in normalized frequency'.

I've played around with other techniques, but not in GNU Radio. The
reason being, a tracking CFO estimator (i.e. one that changes the
estimate over time during a packet) is much harder to implement (read, I
was lazy). Now, if you don't actually want to track, but only estimate
once at the beginning, you won't get much better than S&C.

Note that you'll always have ICI as soon as you have a Doppler spectrum.
With decent equalization, it's not *that* big of a deal as long as it's
not too much ICI.

M