Any carrier frequency offset will cause a loss of subcarrier orthogonality which results in ICI and hence performance degrades severely in MIMO-OFDM systems. In this paper, a time and frequency synchronization solution for multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) systems is proposed. The synchronization is achieved using one Constant Amplitude Zero Auto Correlation (CAZAC) sequence-based preamble which is simultaneously transmitted from all transmit antennas in the same OFDM time instant. The synchronization is accomplished sequentially by coarse time synchronization, fractional frequency offset estimation, integral frequency offset estimation and fine time synchronization. The simulation shows that the proposed algorithm can estimate the timing and frequency offsets efficiently in MIMO-OFDM systems, especially in low signal-to-noise ratio condition.
Time synchronization algorithms for IEEE 802.11 OFDM systems