Hardware Implementation and Performance Evaluation of Multiple Carrier Frequency Offsets Estimation

Abstract

The following is the project report for the Telecommunication project titled Hardware Implementation and Performance Evaluation of Multiple Carrier Frequency Offsets Estimation. Wireless communications are an ever involving field and cooperative communication is a new field of research in this field. Cooperative spatial diversity allows for more robust wireless networks with higher capacity and data rates. These diversity gains, however, diminish with the multiple carrier frequency offsets (MCFOs) that arise due to distributed transmissions over independent channels. A number of techniques have been proposed for multiple CFO estimation, however, their empirical performance remains to be analyzed. The aim of this project was to experimentally analyze the performance of the Iterative-MUltiple SIgnal Characterization (I-MUSIC) algorithm for decode-and-forward (DF) relaying on the universal software radio peripheral (USRP) platforms. The results show that the aforementioned algorithm performs reasonably well, in both line-of-sight (LoS) and non-line-of-sight (NLoS) channels, in terms of mean squared error (MSE) of the estimated CFOs. However, the performance margin greatly depends on the type of environment and the number of data symbols used for estimation.