A Novel Compact Preamble Structure for Timing Synchronization in MIMO-OFDM Systems Using CAZAC Sequences

International audienceTo increase the throughput of transmission systems, MIMO-OFDM technology allows for a better reach and rate of transmission and improves the reception. The synchronization between the transmitter and the receiver has become a big challenge. A bad timing synchronization causes the loss of a lot of information in a MIMO-OFDM system. In this paper, a novel timing synchronization method is proposed for a MIMO-OFDM systems with Nt transmit antennas and Nr receive antennas. The proposed method is based on transmit an orthogonal CAZAC sequences over different transmit antennas. Simulations results show that the proposed solution presents a good performance at a low SNR in AWGN and multipath fading Rayleigh channels. Furthermore, this method can be implemented for MIMO-OFDM system up to 8 x 8 as well. In the proposed method, the coarse and fine timing synchronization are done at the same time at each receive antenna due to the different training sequences transmitted over different transmit antennas