Exploiting Hidden Pilots for Carrier Frequency Offset Estimation for Generalized MC-CDMA Systems

This paper proposes a novel carrier frequency offset (CFO) estimation method for generalized MC-CDMA systems in unknown frequency-selective channels utilizing hidden pi- lots. It is established that CFO is identifiable in the frequency domain by employing cyclic statistics (CS) and linear re-gression (LR) algorithms. We show that the CS-based estimator is capable of mitigating the normalized CFO (NCFO) to a small error value. Then, the LR-based estimator can be employed to offer more accurate estimation by removing the residual quantization error after the CS-based estimator