Synchronization Techniques for Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiple Access (OFDMA): A Tutorial Review

Orthogonal frequency division multiple access (OFDMA) has recently attracted vast research attention from both academia and industry and has become part of new emerging standards for broadband wireless access. Even though the OFDMA concept is simple in its basic principle, the design of a practical OFDMA system is far from being a trivial task. Synchronization represents one of the most challenging issues and plays a major role in the physical layer design. The goal of this paper is to provide a comprehensive survey of the latest results in the field of synchronization for OFDMA systems, with tutorial objectives foremost. After quantifying the effects of synchronization errors on the system performance, we…