Abstract—With the next Gen Wireless Local Area Networks (WLANs) all geared up to enhance the network wireless capacity in gigabits with utmost reliability for mixed environments utilizing the MIMO OFDM/OFDMA technique with reduced subcarrier spacing and denser modulation schemes. These stern requirements make the system to be highly susceptible to Carrier Frequency Offset (CFO) and the IEEE standard specifies a very stringent frequency offset limit to be well within ±20ppm which is a demanding ask to be met to keep all the WiFi stations to operate within their specified channels with minimum spectral leakage. The current article proposes a novel blind carrier frequency offset compensation method which efficiently computes the CFO. The simulation results prove that the performance of the proposed algorithm not only satisfies the prescribed limits of ±20ppm but it is also robust to even higher offsets like ±25ppm. The proposed algorithm can be utilized in WiFi standards such as IEEE 802.11 n/ax. Rayleigh interference with additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) channel was applied to analyze the algorithm’s performance. This technique offers better synchronization and reliable communication.

Index Terms—WLAN, CFO, MIMO, OFDM, CP

Cite: Lalitha H and Navin Kumar, "Blind CFO Compensation for Next Gen WLAN Systems," Journal of Communications vol. 17, no. 12, pp. 1023-1029, December 2022. Doi: 10.12720/jcm.17.12.1023-1029