Timing Synchronization for 802 . 11 a WLANs under Multipath Channels

In the Wireless Local Area Network (WLAN) standard adopted by the IEEE 802.11a standardization group, each data packet starts with a preamble, which consists of ten short training symbols followed by two long training symbols. In this paper, we present an efficient and straightforward coarse timing synchronization scheme based on the short training symbols. Simulation results illustrate that the performance of the proposed scheme is comparable and even superior to that of the conventional timing synchronization method under multipath fading channels. We further show that the combination of the proposed auto-correlation coarse timing synchronization scheme and a frequency domain path delay moving average method leads to a desirable result of symbol timing estimation.