A novel OFDM frame synchronization scheme

Frame synchronization is important for an orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) system. A novel frame synchronization method based on m-sequences for OFDM systems is proposed. An m-sequence is added directly to OFDM signals in the time domain. By utilizing the autocorrelation characteristics of maximal length shift-register sequences (m-sequences), fast frame synchronization can be obtained over slowly fading radio channels. In addition, if we combine the in-sequences based method with the guard interval based method, further improvement can be obtained over fading channels.