A Frame-Start Detector for a 4 × 4 MIMO-OFDM System

Future wireless LANs will increase the peak data rate by employing multiple antennas at both transmitter and receiver. Well designed synchronization algorithms are a prerequisite for meeting stringent QoS requirements. In particular OFDM modulation, which constitutes the basics for WLAN, is very sensitive to timing synchronization errors which incur inter-symbol interference. In this paper, a novel frame synchronization algorithm is proposed that is implemented in the FPGA of a real-time MIMO-OFDM testbed. Simulations show it to be of sufficient performance in scenarios of interest, while the hardware complexity is suitable for an FPGA implementation. Additionally, the algorithm exhibits a good resilience against narrow-band interference, which causes problems in traditional frame-start detection algorithms