The effect of narrowband interference on timing synchronization for OFDM systems

Orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) has been of major interest for both wire line and wireless applications due its high data rate transmission capability and its robustness to multipath delay spread. However, OFDM systems can be extremely sensitive and vulnerable to synchronization errors. This paper investigates the effect of narrowband interference on timing synchronization for OFDM systems. The performance of the Schmidl & Cox (S&C) symbol timing synchronizer [1] is evaluated in an analytical way in the presence of narrowband interferers. Further, simulations have been carried out to verify the validity of approximations in the analysis. It is shown that the S&C algorithm is robust to narrowband interference as long as the signal to interference ratio is not too low.