A novel cell search scheme for OFDM cellular systems (Q886382)

The issue that this paper addresses is that before the user equipment (UE) makes a cell access, it needs to perform a quick cell search, including initial timing/frequency synchronization and cell ID identification. Although the OFDM timing/frequency synchronization has been studied heavily, the results cannot be applied to a multi-cell environment. The authors start with a brief introduction of OFDM and its inherent ability to combat multi-path fading channel in high data rate transmission systems. They propose to use a low overhead oriented cell search scheme for OFDM cellular systems which uses only one OFDM symbol with the L-repetition structure. After describing the OFDM of a multi-carrier modulation system, the authors describe the proposed search engine. First they present the preamble design. Then the cell search procedure and the joint estimation of datamask index and sequence index, which improves performance, are presented. Simulation results show that the proposed scheme can be used in OFDM cellular systems with a very large number of cell IDs and that it works well in a bad multi-cell environment.