Carrier frequency offsets estimation in UWA-OFDM communication systems using Zadoff-Chu sequences

Frequency offset estimation is an important module in the synchronisation of underwater acoustic (UWA) orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) systems. Different ways are used for carrier frequency offset (CFO) estimation such as maximum likelihood based on a cyclic prefix. In this paper, the Zadoff-Chu (ZC) sequences are used for OFDM synchronisation in underwater communications. The normalised carrier frequency offset can be estimated using the ZC cross-correlation between the primary synchronisation signal and the corresponding local signal, which causes large complexity. The ZC sequences have a time centre symmetric property, and thus the autocorrelation of the received primary synchronisation signal can be used for frequency offset estimation. In this paper, we propose a modified algorithm with low complexity for frequency offset estimation. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm can estimate the frequency offset accurately with simple implementation in comparison with the traditional methods.