Blind CFO Estimation in a UFMC System Aided With Virtual Carriers

This letter studies the design of blind estimation technique for carrier frequency offset (CFO) in a universal filtered multicarrier (UFMC) system. We first propose a preliminary scheme, and then further devise a series of improved approaches used in the novel two-stage solution, including stages of initial and residual CFO estimation. For Stage 1, we devise two useful estimation algorithms, respectively. Especially, the latter approach using the frequency-domain received signal avoids intensive computation of the cost function. For Stage 2, we derive a closed-form formula used in the iterations to estimate the residual CFO. It can be shown that the proposed schemes not only provide a performance comparable to that of the non-blind least square-based scheme, but also enjoy much lower computational complexity compared with the conventional exhaustive search approach. The conducted computer simulation results verify the superior performance of the blind CFO estimation for UFMC.