Optimized joint timing synchronization and channel estimation for communications systems with multiple transmit antennas

This paper proposes a joint timing synchronization and channel estimation scheme for communications systems with multiple transmit antennas based on a well-designed training sequence arrangement. In addition, a generalized maximum-likelihood (ML) channel estimation scheme is presented, and this one-shot scheme is applied to obtain all channel impulse responses (CIR) from different transmit antennas. The proposed approach consists of three stages at each receive antenna. First, coarse timing and frequency offset estimates are obtained. Then, an advanced timing, relative timing indices, and the corresponding CIR estimates at the second stage are obtained using the generalized ML estimation based on a sliding observation vector. Finally, the fine time adjustment based on the minimum mean squared error criterion is performed. From the simulation results, the proposed approach has excellent performance in timing synchronization under several channel models at signal-to-noise ratio smaller than 1dB.