Blind synchronization of the OFDM signals in multipath channels on the basis of the time and frequency protection intervals

New methods of symbol-timing and carrier-frequency blind synchronization of an OFDM-signal receiver are developed and studied. They generalize the well-known methods which use either the protection interval in time in the cyclic prefix form or the protection interval with respect to frequency in the form of virtual subcarriers, and are based on their joint application. To reduce the computational complexity, approximate algorithms which are based on the approximation of the optimal rules, but, according to the study results, have almost the same characteristics of parameter-estimation accuracy and the reception bit-error-rate performance are proposed. It is shown that in terms of the parameter-estimation accuracy and the reception bit-error-rate performance, the proposed methods are superior to the well-known methods of synchronization by the cyclic prefix and the virtual subcarriers in the two-path Rayleigh-fading channel. For incoherent systems with the differential phase shift keying variants, using such methods makes it possible to rule out the necessity of accurate synchronization and, due to insignificant redundancy of the system band and the cyclic prefix length, closely approach the reception bit-error-rate performance for perfect synchronization.