Practical Prediction of CFO-Made OFDM Symbol Distortion

The Carrier Frequency Offset (CFO) is considered to be a major drawback of the Orthogonal Frequency-Division Multiplexing (OFDM) signal. So, in many practical situations, specifically with LTE-Advanced downlink introducing carrier aggregation, estimation of the CFO-induced OFDM symbol phase deviation, is of interest. However, this demands complex test equipment, such as e.g. a Vector Signal Analyzer (VSA), which might not be always and everywhere available. Therefore, we applied the link abstraction principle on the Bit Error Rate (BER) that is considered to be determined just by the CFO-caused phase deviation, i.e. as if the channel was noiseless and time-dispersion-free (so that evident bit errors occur just due to the actual CFO). Furthermore, as the CFO-caused squared phase deviation is linear with the instantaneous (per-OFDM-symbol) Peak-to-Average Power Ratio (PAPR), which is related to the Error Vector Magnitude (EVM) and so with BER, we develop a simple model for analytical BER-based estimating of CFO. In this sense, we considered the easy-to-measure BER degradation as resulting just from the according additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) source, which abstracts the CFO distortion. The proposed analytical model is validated by according Monte-Carlo simulations.