Semi-Blind Joint Multi-CFO and Multi-Channel Estimation for GFDMA with Arbitrary Carrier Assignment

We propose a low-complexity semi-blind joint multi- carrier frequency offset (CFO) and multi-channel estimation scheme for uplink generalized frequency division multiple access (GFDMA) systems. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work to investigate the estimation of both CFOs and channels for a wide range of GFDMA systems, allowing arbitrary carrier assignment, modulation type and cyclic prefix length, and a wide range of the number of receive antennas. Thanks to the orthogonality between noise subspace and each signal subspace of U users, a complex U-CFO and U-channel estimation problem is decomposed into 2U one-dimensional problems, and solved in a semi-blind manner. Also, the multi-CFO compensation is performed at receiver rather than transmitter, avoiding spectral overhead due to feedback of multiple CFOs. Simulation results show that the proposed scheme significantly outperforms the existing methods in terms of bit error rate (BER) and root-mean-square-errors (RMSEs) of CFO and channel estimation, at much lower computational complexity than the existing methods.