Synchronization in NC-OFDM-Based Cognitive Radio Platforms

This chapter provides essential information with regard to the synchronization issues in Non-Contiguous Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (NC-OFDM)-based systems. It also provides a flexible timing synchronization scheme implemented on an Altera Stratix-V Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) device. The main component of the synchronizer is a reconfigurable module which calculates the Sum-of-Products (SoP) of the incoming signal with predefined coefficients. The SoP module performs as a multicorrelator on demand. Furthermore, different architectures of the SoP block and their respective performance evaluations are discussed in detail. Eventually, all developed architectures are compared to each other in terms of power consumption, silicon area, maximum frequency, etc.