An ESPRIT-based Approach for Initial Ranging in OFDMA Systems

This work presents a novel initial ranging scheme for orthogonal frequency-division multiple-access networks. Users that intend to establish a communication link with the base station (BS) are normally misaligned both in time and frequency and the goal is to jointly estimate their timing errors and carrier frequency offsets with respect to the BS local references. This is accomplished with affordable complexity by resorting to the ESPRIT algorithm. Computer simulations are used to assess the effectiveness of the proposed solution and to make comparisons with existing alternatives.