Abstract: The timing errors in Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM), which occur when the first path is not the strongest one in the multipath fading channel, would incur a high probability of miss detection. To solve this problem, a timing synchronization algorithm was proposed, which can be used to exploit the cycle-right-shift property of channel impulse response to estimate precisely the first path delay. In this algorithm, first, the delay of the strongest path was estimated through coarse synchronization. Then, the channel impulse response was obtained using the Least Square (LS) algorithm, based on which the location of each path was determined according to the difference in a sliding window. Finally, the first path was detected using the adaptive threshold approach. Theoretical analysis and simulation results show that, compared with the existing methods, the proposed algorithm can decrease the probability of miss detection and improve the system timing performance.

Key words: communication, orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM), timing synchronization, first arrival path delay, least square algorithm