Synchronization in OFDM Systems with 1-bit ADC

Abstract

Orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) is the technology suitable for multi-carrier transmission, and has played an important role in communication systems supporting wideband such as 4G, 5G mobile communications, wireless local access network, etc. Also, as the demand for data transmission rates has enormously increased and thus the communication systems have been complicated, the amount of data that has to be processed in the analog domain has greatly increased. In particular, as the communication bandwidth is expanded, the analog-to-digital converter (ADC) has burdened by the growth of the power consumption required to process the data and the hardware implementation complexity. To deal with these problems, 1-bit ADC can be considered as one way. However, since the signal distortion is caused by the extreme quantization from 1-bit ADC, the sign of the signal can be only obtained as the available information. Under the severe limitation of the available information, synchronization performances essential for the OFDM systems are deteriorated, which degrades the communication quality and reliability. This paper focuses on how to effectively perform the synchronization process in the OFDM systems with 1-bit ADC.