ML symbol synchronization for OFDM-based WLANs in unknown frequency-selective fading channels

Based on the maximum-likelihood principle and the preamble structure of IEEE 802.11a WLAN standard, this paper proposes a new symbol synchronization algorithm for IEEE 802.11a WLANs over frequency-selective fading channels. In addition to the physical channel, the effects of filtering and unknown sampling phase offset are also considered. Loss in system performance due to synchronization error is used as a performance criterion. Computer simulations show that the proposed algorithm has comparable performances to the algorithm based on the generalized Akaike information criterion (GAIC), but the proposed algorithm exhibits reduced complexity.