Orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) is very sensitive to the frequency errors caused by phase noise and Doppler shift. These errors will disturb the orthogonality among subcarriers and cause intercarrier interference (ICI). A simple method to combat ICI is proposed in this letter. The main idea is to map each data symbol onto a couple of subcarriers rather to a single subcarrier. Different from the conventional adjacent coupling and symmetric coupling methods, the frequency diversity can be utilized more efficiently by the proposed adaptive coupling method based on optimal subcarrier spacing. Numerical results show that our proposed method provides a robust signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) improvement over the conventional coupling methods.

A simple DFT-based noise variance estimator for orthogonal frequency division multiplexing access (OFDMA) systems is proposed. The conventional DFT-based estimator differentiates the channel impulse response and noise in the time domain. However, for partial frequency response, its time domain signal will leak to all taps due to the windowing effect. The noise and channel leakage power become mixed. In order to accurately derive the noise power, we propose a novel symmetric extension method to reduce the channel leakage power. This method is based on the improved signal continuity at the boundaries introduced by symmetric extension. Numerical results show that the normalized mean square error (NMSE) of our proposed method is significantly lower than that of the conventional DFT method.

A blind symbol synchronization scheme for MIMO and Multi-User OFDM systems is proposed, which utilizes short-time Fourier Transformation (STFT) to obtain 2D (time and frequency) timing information from the received signals. By analyzing the obtained 2D time-frequency amplitude spectrum, intervals where no inter-symbol interference (ISI) exists are checked out for symbol synchronization, and samples during these intervals are used to carry out carrier frequency offset estimation. Theoretical analysis and simulation results show that the proposed method is more robust and provides more accurate carrier frequency offset estimation than traditional schemes.