doi:10.

1994/s1001002536 UbiCC Journal

A Two-Stage Frequency-Offset Estimation and

Compensation Scheme for OFDMA System

Mostafa.Moh1, Abdel Fadeel Gamal 2, I.I.Ibrahim2

1
Electronics and Communication Department, Faculty of Engineering,
EL shorouk Academy, Cairo, Egypt. Muhamed_mostafe@yahoo.com
2
Electronics and Communication Department, Faculty of Engineering,
Helwan University, Cairo, Egypt. gam_hel@yahoo.com;iiibrahim@softhome.net

Abstract
This paper reports a study of the carrier frequency offset (CFO) estimation and
compensation in the uplink of the orthogonal frequency division multiple access
(OFDMA) system with interleaved subcarrier assignment. The presence of CFOs
between the transmitters and the uplink receiver will destroy the orthogonality among
the different subcarriers, resulting in inter-carrier interference and multiuser interference.
This paper proposes a pseudo oinverse CFO compensation method based on the signal
structure. The proposed method can compensate the CFOs of all users simultaneously
and isolate the signals from all users at the same time. this method provides a
considerable signal-to-noise ratio gain on the bit error rate performance and has a
relatively low implementation complexity.

Key words Orthogonal Frequency-Division Multiple Access (OFDMA); Carrier

Frequency Offset(CFO) ;Pseudoinverse.

1. INTRODUCTION maintained[1,2]. In general, frequency

Broadband wireless multiple access networks have
attracted much attention recently. In the IEEE
802.16/WiMAX family of standards, orthogonal
frequency division multiple access (OFDMA) has
been selected as the physical-layer technology[1,2].
OFDMA is also being pursued as a potential
candidate for future mobile communication systems.
In OFDMA, subcarriers are assigned to different users
for parallel signal transmission, and a frequency guard
band is not employed between adjacent users, thereby
resulting in high frequency efficiency. In the additive
white Gaussian noise channel, orthogonality of the
subcarriers prevents intercarrier interferences and
multiuser interferences among users of an OFDMA
system. However, OFDMA inherits a key weakness
of OFDM, namely that it is sensitive to carrier
frequency offsets (CFO) induced by Doppler effects
and/or poor oscillator alignments. In such cases, the
CFOs will destroy the orthogonality among the
different subcarriers, resulting in intercarrier
interferences and multiuser interferences[3]. To
achieve a desirable performance there is a strict
requirement on the frequency synchronization
between each subscriber station (SS) and the base
station (BS) in an OFDMA uplink. For example, in
802.16d/e, the specification requires that a precision
of 2% in the subcarrier spacing should be
synchronization is composed of CFO estimation and
CFO correction. On the CFO correction side, two
different schemes, namely, compensation[4,5] and
feedback[6,7], are used. In order to achieve frequency
synchronization, the first scheme compensates the
effect of carrier frequency offsets on the received
signals by using signal processing at the uplink
receiver, and does not need the control channel. In the
second scheme it is necessary to transmit the CFO
information back to each user via the downlink
control channel for the adjustment of the oscillator at
the SS. This procedure results in an additional load on
the downlink transmission, and moreover, the
adjustment may be outdated due to the relatively fast
channel variation in mobile communications. This
paper focuses on the first scheme. In the circular-
convolution method proposed by Choi et al.[8], CFO
compensation is applied to each user after the signals
are isolated via the discrete Fourier transform (DFT)
based on the fact that time domain multiplication is
equivalent to frequency domain circular convolution.
However, the separated signals contain the CFO
information for all adjacent users, which results in
performance degradation when there are multiple
users or some large CFOs. In this paper, we
investigate CFO compensation in an OFDMA uplink
system. The interleaved subcarrier assignment scheme
is chosen because it provides maximum frequency

UbiCC Journal, Volume 4, Number 5, December 2009 Page 1151

doi:10.1994/s1001002536
diversity and increases the capacity in frequency-
selective fading channels. This paper presents a
pseudoinverse CFO-compensation method based on
the signal structure. The proposed CFO compensator
has a smaller computational complexity and exhibits a
considerable bit error rate (BER) gain compared with
the existing methods. Additionally, simulation results
show that this method is not sensitive to large CFOs
and can maintain good BER performance in the
presence of multiple users.
2. SYSTEM MODELING
In this section, we introduce the signal model for
the interleaved-OFDMA uplink following [9].
Consider an OFDMA system with N subcarriers and
M users, where each SS communicates with the BS
through an independent multipath channel. Suppose
UbiCC Journal
Next, the block x ( m ) of length N  N CP is serialized to
yield x ( m ) (n) , which is pulse shaped, and then power
amplified, carrier modulated, and transmitted through
the multipath fading channel. We suppose that the
signals are transmitted through a slowly time variant
multipath fading channel, i.e., the fading coefficients
are assumed to be constant during each OFDMA
block. Let H p(m ) denote the channel frequency
response on the (q ( m )  pQ ) -th subcarrier of the m-th
user’s channel during one OFDMA block. For
simplicity, both time synchronization and sampling
are assumed to be ideally performed at the uplink
receiver. In the absence of noise, after the removal of
CP, the remaining N samples of each OFDMA block
of the m-th user are given as
P 1
2
( pQ  q( m )  ( m ) ) n
r ( m ) (n)   H p( m ) S p 
(m) j

that the N subcarriers are divided into Q ubchannels, p 0

e N

(3)
and each subchannel has P  N/Q subcarriers. For 2 ( m ) ( m )
( q 
2

 H p( m ) S p
j )n (m) j pn

the interleaved subcarrier assignment, the q-th

e N
e P

subchannel is composed of subcarriers with indexes where n  0,1,..., N  1 , and where  ( m )  (0.5,0.5) is
{q, Q  q, .,(P-1 )Q  q}, q  0,1, ,Q-1 . the normalized CFO of the m-th user. Let
Let superscript (.) ( m ) denotes the m-th user. Fig.1 {f ( m ) }Mm0 represent the CFOs between users and the
depicts the transmitter structure for the m-th user, with uplink receiver and f denote the subcarrier spacing.
s (m)  [ S 0(m) S1(m)  S P(m)1 ] denoting the information block Then  ( m ) is defined as
that the m-th user will transmit during one OFDMA  ( m )  f ( m )  f (4)
block. This block is first mapped into a set of N Considering a system with M users, the multiple user
modulation symbols: {X i(m) }iN01 , where, signal structure is given by
M M P1 2
S (m) , r (n)   r ( m ) (n)    H p( m ) S p
(m) j ( pQ  q ( m )  ( m ) ) n

X (m) 
  g,p
i  pQ  q ( m )
(1) m1 m1 p 0
e N (5)
g,i
0 , otherwise Since r ( m ) (n) has a special periodic-like structure
with every P samples according to
And p  0,1, P-1 , and q ( m ) denotes the j 2v ( q ( m )  ( m ) ) / Q
subchannel index of user m. In the OFDMA system, r ( m ) (n  vP)  e r ( m ) ( n) (6)
the length of the cyclic prefix (CP) is equivalent to where v is an integer. Then {r (n)} M
m0
can be
N CP samples, and is assumed to be longer than the arranged into a Q  P matrix:
maximum channel delay spread. After an N-point  r(P  1) 
 r(0)
inverse fast Fourier transform (IFFT) and CP insertion  r(P)
at the transmitter, the n-th element of the time-domain  r(2P  1)
A 
block vector x ( m ) of the m-th user is given by      (7)
 
N 1
x n( m )   X i( m ) e
j 2nk
N , N CP  n  N  1 (2) r(N  P)  r(N  1)  QP
i 0
VS  V{UΘ{UFP )}
where  represents the Schur product or element-by
element product, S  U( BFP ) with
 u (1)   b (1) 
 (2)   (2) 
u  b 
U ,B  
     
 (M)   (M) 
u  MP b  MP

Fig.1 Interleaved –OFDMA uplink transmitter FP is a P  P IFFT matrix given by

structure of the m-th user

UbiCC Journal, Volume 4, Number 5, December 2009 Page 1152

doi:10.1994/s1001002536 UbiCC Journal
1 1  1  matrix, and its eigenvalues are all positive, real
1 j
2π
j
2ππ( 1)
 numbers. Let 1  2    Q denote the Q
FP  
e P  e P

  eigenvalues of Ψ in descending order. Based on the
  
 j
2ππ( 1)
j
2ππ( 1)(P 1)  subspace processing technique [10], we find that
 e
1 P  e P
 PP { ( m ) }Mm1 corresponds to the M largest values of`
and V  v (1) v (2)  v (M)  is a Vandermonde PCFO ( ) , which is given by
matrix with the following format: 1
 1 1  1  PCFO ( )  2
(13)
H H
 j2π2 (1)
j2π2 (2)
j2π2  (M) a ( )U zU z a ( )
e e  e
V



(8) Where a ( )  1 e j 2  e j 2 ( Q1)  ,
U z is
   
 j2π2π 1)θ j2π2π 1)θ(1)
j2π2π 1)θ 
(2) (M)
Q  (Q  M ) matrix composed of the Q  M
e e  e 
eigenvectors corresponding to  M 1 ,  , Q and the
Moreover, v (m) , u (m) , and b (m) are defined as
v (m)  1  e
j 2 πθ(m)
 e , j 2 π(Q1 )θ (m) T
subspace spanned by U z is the noise subspace of  .
As PCFO ( ) is a function of the effective CFO, we
 1 ,
j 2 πθ / P j 2 π ( P1) θ / P
(m) (m)
u (m) e  e define PCFO ( ) as the CFO spectrum according to the
 H S 
(m) (m) ( m) (m) (m) (m)
b (m) 1 H S  H S
1 2 2 p p
definition of Direction-Of-Arrival (DOA) spectrum in
(9) the MUSIC algorithm. With a large number of
s D (h )
(m) (m)
p columns in Y, the covariance matrix Ψ can be
Where h (m)  H (m)
1 H
( m)
2
 H
(m)
P
T , D (h
p
(m)
) is estimated by
ˆ  1  H  1  y y H
P

the P  P Diagonal matrix with diagonal h ,

(m)
 l l (14)
P P l 1
s (m)  S 0
( m
)
S1  S P1 ,and  is given by
( m ) ( m ) ( m)
 Therefore, Û z ,the estimation of U z ,can be derived
 ( m )  (q ( m )   ( m ) ) / Q (10)
by introducing eigen decomposition to ̂ .
 is defined as the effective CFO of the m-th user;
(m)

its range is [(q ( m )  0.5) Q , ( q ( m )  0.5) Q] . 3.2. Two-stage CFO-estimation algorithm

Considering the noise, a matrix form representation
of an OFDMA block is given by
Y  A  W  VS  W
where W is a Q  P AWGN matrix. Each element
of W is a Gaussian random variable with zero mean
and variance  2 .
3. CFO Estimation
In this section, we first define the CFO spectrum
and then the main steps of a two-stage CFO-
estimation algorithm based on subspace processing in
order to estimate the CFOs of all users using only one
OFDMA block are summarized in the Appendix.
3.1. Definition of the CFO spectrum
From Eq.(11), Y is similar to the data model of the
MUSIC algorithm in the multi-antennas receiving
system, and  ( m ) has the same structure as the array
From Eq.(13), estimation of { ( m ) }mM1 corresponds to
the m-th largest peaks of PCFO ( ) .Cao,etal. proposed
(11) a CFO-estimation algorithm based on the signal
structure[9]. The flowchart of the algorithm is
summarized in the Appendix.
4. CFO Compensation
4.1. pseudoinverse method
In this section, a pseudoinverse scheme (shown in
Fig.2) based on the signal structure of Eq. (11) is
proposed to compensate the CFOs of all users. The
scheme uses the pseudoinverse of Vˆ , which is the
estimation of V . The steps are as follows.
Step 1 Using Eq. (11), we obtain the estimate of
S  U( BFP ) via
Sˆ  V
ˆ † Y SV
ˆ†W (15)
Where Vˆ is a Q  M matrix with [Vˆ ]q ,m  e
j 2qˆ( m )

steering vector .Let y l , sl , wl denote, the l-th column

(q  0,1,...., Q  1, m  1,2,...., M ) , ˆ ( m ) is the estimate
of Y, S, W, respectively where l=1,2,…,P, and we
have yl  Vsl  wl . The covariance matrix of yl is of  ( m ) and (.) represents the pseudoinverse.
given by, In general, the signals of different users are
  E[ yl ylH ]  V V   2 I (12) independent, and therefore, V is an overdetermined
where E[.] signifies the expectation, (.) H represents matrix with Q  M . So V ˆ † can be computed by

the Hermitian   E[ sl slH ] is the

operation, ˆ †  (Vˆ H Vˆ ) 1Vˆ H
V (16)
covariance of sl ,and I is a Q×Q identity matrix. where (.) denotes conjugate transposition. This step
H

From Eq.(12), it is known that Ψ is a Hermitian compensates the CFOs of all users simultaneously and

UbiCC Journal, Volume 4, Number 5, December 2009 Page 1153

doi:10.1994/s1001002536
isolates the signals of all users at the same time,
thereby further reducing interference between the
adjacent users.
Step 2 Using Eq.(7), we can further compensate the
CFOs of all users by applying the Schur product
between Û  and Ŝ , which leads to
ˆ  ΘSˆ
Bˆ '  U
Where Û is the estimate of
j 2pˆ( m ) / P
[Uˆ ]m , p  e (m  1,2,...., M , p  0,1,....P  1) ,
and (.)  denotes the conjugate operation.
Step 3 After P-point FFT processing, the “frequency
domain” signal, i.e., the estimation of B is given by
post-multiplying B̂' by FPH , which leads to
Bˆ  B ˆ ' F H  B  [U
P
ˆ ΘV
ˆ † W]F H
P
(18)
Finally, the symbols of each user can be recovered by
using zero-forcing equalizer, according to
sˆ (m)  bˆ (m) D † P (h (m) ) (19)
Where bˆ (m)  sˆ (m) D P (h (m) ) is the m-th row of
B̂ , m  1,2,...., M

and where sˆ (m)  Sˆ0(m) Sˆ1(m)  Sˆ P(m)1 . 
The proposed pseudoinverse method compensates the
CFOs of all users simultaneously in the first step and
isolates at the same time the signals of each user,
thereby reducing interference between adjacent users.
In the second step, the CFOs of all users can be
further compensated. Therefore, the newly proposed
method is not sensitive to large CFOs and has good
BER performance in the presence of multiple users.
Fig. 2 Pseudoinverse CFO-compensator structure in
the uplink of an OFDMA system with interleaved
subcarrie Assignmen
UbiCC Journal, Volume 4, Number 5, December 2009
UbiCC Journal
4.2. Computation Complexity
In this section, the computation complexity of the two
CFO compensators mentioned above is evaluated. For
brevity, the operation of complex multiplication is
abbreviated as CM, and pseudoinverse are denoted
Pinv. For the Pinv compensator, the implementation
of V ˆ † Q  M using the SVD method requires
(17)
U with O (QM 2 )(Q  M ) computations. In Step1,the method
requires 4QM 2 CMs for SVD processing[10] and
MPQ CMs for the multiplication of Vˆ † Y . In Steps 2
and 3, the operations of Uˆ  ΘSˆ and the P-point FFT
of each user require MP and ( P/ 2) Log 2 P CM,
respectively. Thus, the total number of CMs required
by the Pinv compensator is approximately
4QM 2  MPQ  MP  M ( P/ 2) Log 2 P .Table 1 shows
the comparison between the complexity of the
proposed Pinv method for certain values of
N , Q ,and M . It is easy to see that the Pinv method
has a much lower complexity For small number of
users
Table 1 Number of complex multiplications
Method 4 users 8 users 12 users
( M  4) ( M  8) ( M  12)
N  2048 Pinv method 11 520 25 088 40 704
Q  16
N  2048 Pinv method 11 264 26 624 46 080
Q  32
5. Simulation Results
In this section, the performance of the proposed
algorithm is evaluated using computer simulation. The
transmission parameters of the interleaved-OFDMA
uplink system are selected from IEEE 802.16d/e[1,2].
The considered OFDMA system
has N  2048 subcarriers and CP length of 256 .
QPSK modulation scheme is used to generate the
transmitted symbols. The wireless channel is modeled
as a frequency-selective fading channel consisting of
six independent Rayleigh multipaths, with an
exponentially decaying power-delay profile. The root
mean square (RMS) delay spread is 1.4 μs .The CFOs
are estimated using the MUSIC-like algorithm
proposed by Cao et al.[9], and then used to simulate
the average BER performance of all users in the
interleaved-OFDMA uplink system. The channel
knowledge is assumed to be perfectly known. For
comparison, we also plot the BER performance of the
same system without CFOs and with no CFO
compensation.
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doi:10.1994/s1001002536 UbiCC Journal

5.1. BER performance (4 users) 6. Conclusions

In the simulation, the numbers of subchannels and
users are Q  16 and M  4 , respectively, the
occupied subchannels are [0 1 2 3] , and the
normalized CFOs are [0.1 -0.2 -0.1 0.2] .
Figure 5 depicts the BER of uncoded transmissions. It
is shown that, without synchronization, the BER has
an error floor bounded around 0.03 .
Figure5 illustrates that at SNR=20dB the BER's are
2  10 4 , 6  10 4 and 8  10 2 corresponding to offset
free, pseudoinverse method and No compensation
respectively.
0
10
-1
10
-2
10
A pseudoinverse CFO-compensation method for
an interleaved-OFDMA uplink system is presented in
this paper. The method is based on the signal
structure. This method compensates the CFOs of all
users simultaneously and isolates at the same time the
signals of each user, thereby reducing the interference
between adjacent users. The proposed method has a
lower computational complexity. The method can
approach the performance of systems without CFOs in
terms of the BER and guarantee the performance of
systems with high robustness in the case of multiple
users and/or relatively large CFOs.
No Compensatio
Pinv method References
Offset free (e=0)
[1] IEEE Std. 802.16d. Air interface for fixed broadband wireless
access systems. New York: IEEE, 2004.

[2] IEEE P802.16e/D12. Draft IEEE standard for local and

metropolitan area networks—Part 16: Air interface for fixed and
BER

-3
10
mobile broadband wireless access systems— Amendment for
physical and medium access control layers for combined fixed and
-4
10 mobile operation in licensed bands. New York: IEEE, 2005.

[3] Tonello M, Laurenti N, Pupolin S. Analysis of the uplink of an

-5
10 asynchronous multi-user DMT OFDMA system impaired by time
offsets, frequency offsets, and multi-path fading. In: Proc.
-6
Vehicular Technology Conf. Boston, MA: IEEE Press, 2000: 1094-
10
0 5 10 15 20 25 30 1099.
SNR(dB)
[4] Huang Defeng, Letaief K B. An Interference-cancellation
Fig.3 BER performance versus SNR (Q=16,M=4) scheme for carrier frequency offsets correction in OFDMA systems.
IEEE Trans. Commun., 2005, 53(7): 1155-1165.

5.2. Computation complexity [5] Fantacci R, Marabissi D, Papini S. Multiuser interference

cancellation receivers for OFDMA uplink communications with
Figure 6 shows the computation complexity of the carrier frequency offset. In: Proc. GLOBECOM. Dallas, TX: IEEE
pseudoinverse compensator. And the proposed Press, 2004: 2808-2812.
method is compiled using MATLAB V7.1 under a
Linux operation system, and were run on a 2.8-GHz [6] Beek J J, Borjesson P O, Boucheret M L, et al. A time and
frequency synchronization scheme for multiuser OFDM. IEEE J.
Pentium 4 personal computer. The SNR of each user Select. Areas Commun., 1999, 17(11): 1900-1914.
is assigned to be 20 dB and the number of Monte
Carlo tests is 300 in the simulation. [7] Morelli M. Timing and frequency synchronization for the uplink
of an OFDMA system. IEEE Trans. Communications, 2004, 52(2):
10
-2 296-306.

[8] Choi J, Lee C, Jung H W, et al. Carrier frequency offset

compensation for uplink of OFDM-FDMA systems. IEEE
Commun. Lett., 2000, 4(2): 414-416.

[9] Cao Z, Tureli U, Yao Y D. Deterministic multiuser

Average CPU time (s)

carrierfrequency offset estimation for Interleaved OFDMA uplink.

IEEE Trans. Commun., 2004, 52(9): 1585-1594.
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10
[10] Fan Da ,Cao Zhigang, Carrier frequency offset estimation for
interleaved OFDM uplink based on subspace processing, IEEE J.
on Select. Areas in Commun., July (2007), Vol.24 No.4,433–438.

[11] J. Rissanen. Modeling by shortest data description,

Automatica,14(1978), 465–471.

-4
10
0 2 4 6 8 10 12
Number of users

Fig.4 the average CPU time versus number of users

UbiCC Journal, Volume 4, Number 5, December 2009 Page 1155

doi:10.1994/s1001002536
Appendix
The flowchart of the algorithm is shown in Fig.2
1) Coarse Estimation
First, we introduce SVD (Eigen decomposition)
to ̂ .Then the number of users can be estimated by
means of the AIC , or the MDL [10], criterion using
the Eigen values of ̂ .After knowing the user
number, the coarse estimation of { ( m ) }M , {ˆ ( m ) }M
m1 m1
can be derived by performing the coarse peak-search
in the CFO spectrum, PCFO ( )
  (0  0.5) / Q, (Q  1  0.5) / Q , where the
increment of θ is
θ inc  0.1/Q . From Eq.(15), we can obtain the relation
formula between the effective CFO and the
subchannel index of the m-th user, which is given by,
 ( m) Q  q ( m )   ( m ) , m=1,2,…,M (20)
Fig.3 illustrates the relation between { } where
(m) M
m1
the arrows represent the occupied subchannels. Since
 ( m )  (0.5,0.5) ,the subchannel index of the m-th
user can be estimated via,
qˆ ( m )  [ˆ ( m ) Q  0.5]
L
(21)
Where qˆ ( m ) is the estimate of q ( m ) ,and X  denotes
the integer equal to or less than X. Because the
number of active users and occupied subchannels can
be estimated, the proposed algorithm is suitable for
systems with random subchannel assignment.
In summary, the algorithm is similar to the MUSIC
algorithm, and the steps of the coarse-estimation
stages are described
Fig .5 Flowchart of the proposed two-stage CFO-
estimation algorithm based on subspace processing
UbiCC Journal, Volume 4, Number 5, December 2009
UbiCC Journal
Fig.6 The relation between the effective CFOs and
the subchannel indexes
as follows:
Step 1: arrange the received signal samples into
matrix form Y;
ˆ   H / P ;
Step 2: calculate the covariance matrix 
Step 3: introduce eigen-decomposition to ̂ ;
Step 4: estimate the number of users M̂ by using the
AIC or the MDL criterion and obtain Û z with the
eigenvectors of ̂ ;
Step 5: find the M̂ largest peaks of PCFO ( ) over the
range
  (0  0.5) / Q, (Q  1  0.5) / Q  in order to obtain
the coarse estimations {ˆ ( m ) }Mm1 , where the increment
of θ in each round is  inc  0.1 / Q ;
Step 6: estimate users’ subchannels according to
Eq.(21).
2) Fine Estimation
In this stage, the fine peak-search is performed in the
CFO spectrum PCFO ( ) with
  [(qˆ ( m )  0.5) / Q, (qˆ ( m )  0.5) / Q ] , m  1,2,..., Mˆ ,
and, hence, the accurate estimations of all the CFOs
can be obtained. The increment of θ in each round is
 inc  0.001 / Q .
The steps for the fine-estimation stage are
summarized as follow:
Step 1: select user m from M̂ users;
Step2: find the largest peak of PCFO ( ) in
  (qˆ ( m )  0.5) / Q, (qˆ ( m )  0.5) / Q  , in order to obtain
the fine estimation ˆ ( m ) with the increment
s
 inc  0.001 / Q ;
Step 3: calculate fˆ ( m ) using Eq.(22) ;
fˆ ( m )  ˆ ( m ) f  (Qˆ ( m )  qˆ ( m ) ) f
s (22)
Step 4: return to Step 1 until all the CFOs Of M̂
users are estimated.
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