Joint Timing Offset and Channel Estimation for Multi-User UFMC Uplink

The universal filtered multi-carrier (UFMC) system, which groups and filters subcarriers before transmission, is a potential multi-carrier modulation technique for the emerging Machine-Type Communications. Given the relaxed time synchronization requirement of UFMC, we design a novel joint timing offset and channel estimation method for multi-user UFMC uplink transmission. The joint estimation problem is formulated based on atomic norm minimization (ANM) that enhances the sparsity of timing offsets in the continuous frequency domain. Simulation results show that the proposed method can achieve considerable performance gain, as compared with existing approaches.