Interaction between Symbol Timing Offset and Channel Interpolation in OFDM Systems: BER Analysis and Performance Degradation

In orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) systems, since the cyclic prefix (CP) is designed to be longer than the channel impulse response, there exists a certain range within the CP where symbol timing synchronization can be accomplished avoiding adjacent inter symbol interference. However, the appearance of a linear phase term across subcarriers in the frequency-domain due to symbol timing offset (STO) is known to affect the performance of channel interpolation. In this paper, we analyze the performance degradation due to the interaction between STO and channel interpolation in OFDM systems affected by multipath Rayleigh fading. Particularly, simple closed-form expressions for the bit error rate (BER) are obtained for different quadrature amplitude modulation constellations. Results show that there exists an irreducible BER floor due to STO and channel interpolation, which depends on the STO, the subcarrier index, the pilot spacing and the correlation between pilot subcarriers.