Blind carrier frequency offset estimation for tile-based orthogonal frequency division multiple access uplink with multi-antenna receiver

In this study, the authors propose a blind carrier frequency offset (CFO) estimation method for the tile structure orthogonal frequency division multiple access (OFDMA) uplink with multi-antenna receiver. They employ an iterative approach to extract the signal component for each user gradually and propose a carefully designed CFO estimator to update the CFO estimate during the iterative procedure. The key ingredient of the proposed method is using few subcarriers on both sides within each tile as the ‘guard subcarriers’, which can greatly mitigate the effect of multi-user interference. The proposed method supports not only fully loaded transmissions, but also the generalised assignment scheme that provides the flexibility for dynamical resource allocation. The numerical results are provided, which indicate that the proposed method can almost converge to the analytical lower bound within a few iterative cycles. It is seen that the proposed method also outperforms the existing competitor with multi-antenna receiver in terms of estimation performance, especially with few adopted blocks.