CFO sensitivity and efficient joint estimation for the short filter multicarrier system FBMC-PAM

•An analysis of the CFO sensitivity of the FBMC-PAM system is provided by exploiting an approximate expression of the SIR.•The results show that the FBMC-PAM system is superior to the considered systems when all of them are subject to the same CFO.•A preamble-based joint symbol timing and CFO estimator for FBMC-PAM transceivers is derived.•The proposed method can assure almost ideal performance provided that the residual CFO is compensated in the frequency domain. Sensitivity to carrier frequency offset, due to oscillator inaccuracy and terminal mobility, is a key issue that modern multicarrier systems have to face. In that respect, FBMC-PAM holds a specific position due to its short prototype filter: the overlapping factor is K=2 and the width of the main lobe of its frequency response is 3 times the sub-carrier spacing, while OFDM and FBMC-OQAM schemes have frequency response whose main lobe width is 2 times the sub-carrier spacing. As a consequence, it is shown in the present paper that FBMC-PAM outperforms other multicarrier techniques in terms of CFO sensitivity. In order to best exploit this property in burst transmission, an efficient and accurate approach for joint symbol timing and CFO estimation is proposed, based on a specific preamble. A theoretical in-depth analysis of the scheme is provided as well as performance validation in multipath channel through simulations.