Timing Synchronization for 802.11a WLANs under Multipath Channels

In the Wireless Local Area Network

(WLAN) standard adopted by the IEEE 802.11a

standardization group, each data packet starts with a

preamble, which consists of ten short training symbols

followed by two long training symbols. In this paper,

we present an efficient and straightforward coarse

timing synchronization scheme based on the short

training symbols. Simulation results illustrate that the

performance of the proposed scheme is comparable

and even superior to that of the conventional timing

synchronization method under multipath fading

channels. We further show that the combination of

the proposed auto-correlation coarse timing

synchronization scheme and a frequency domain path

delay moving average method leads to a desirable

result of symbol timing estimation.