Abstract—This paper details on the design of OFDM receivers.
Special attention is paid to the OFDM-specific receiver functions
necessary to demodulate the received signal and deliver soft
information to the outer receiver for decoding. In Part I of the
paper, the effects of nonideal transmission conditions have been
thoroughly analyzed. To show the impact of the synchronization
algorithms—which are most critical in OFDM—on system performance and complexity we consider the design of a complete
receiver consisting of symbol synchronization, carrier/sampling
clock synchronization and channel estimation. The performance
of the algorithms is analyzed and a qualitative estimate of the
resulting complexity is given. This allows to draw conclusions
concerning the achievable system performance under realistic
complexity assumptions