due to its many advantagesvision Multiplexing (OFDM) is well suited for wirelessOrthogonal Frequency Dibroadband access systems. A potential drawback of OFDM,
however, is its sensitivity to receiver synchronization imperfections. In this context, two questions are of prime interest: 1) How
much of the theoretical performance of OFDM can be realized,
considering the complete inner receiver? 2) Is the complexity of
the receivers critically increased by the synchronization algorithms?
Instead of presenting a detailed analysis of isolated algorithms, this paper focuses on the complete system design
process considering the European standard DVB-T for digital
TV [1]: selection of suitable algorithms, interactions between
the receiver tasks, and the tradeoff between receiver complexity
and performance.
One focus of the paper is the—often underestimated—task
of system acquisition. Fast and reliable system startup requires
dedicated algorithms and additional design effort
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