D2D (Device-to-Device) communication has received considerable attention in recent years as one of the key technologies for future communication systems. Among the typical D2D communication systems, FlashLinQ (FLQ) adopted single-tone OFDM (Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing) transmission which enables wide-sense discovery and distributed channel-aware link scheduling. Although synchronization based on a CES (Common External Source) is basically assumed in FLQ, a means to support devices when they are unable to use a CES is still necessary. In most OFDM systems, CFO (Carrier Frequency Offset) induces ICI (Inter Channel Interference) which degrades overall system performance drastically. Especially in D2D systems, ICI can be amplified due to different path losses between link and a precise estimation and correction of CFO is very important. Many CFO estimation algorithms based on DA (Data Aided) and NDA (None Data Aided) were proposed for OFDM systems, but there are several constraint conditions on frequency synchronization in D2D systems. Therefore, in this paper, we propose a new NDA-CFO estimation method for OFDM based D2D systems. The proposed method is based on the characteristics of single-tone OFDM signal, and is composed of two estimation stages: initial estimation and feed-back estimation. In initial estimation, the estimation of CFO is obtained by using two correlation results in a symbol. Also, estimation range can be adaptively defined as the distance between the two windows. In feed-back estimation, the distance between the two correlation results is gradually increased by re-using the estimated CFO and the correlation results. Therefore, more precise CFO estimation can be obtained. A numerical analysis and performance evaluation verify that the proposed method has a large estimation range and achieves precise estimation performance compared to the conventional methods.

Frequency estimation of a complex single-tone in additive white Gaussian noise from irregularly-spaced samples is addressed. In this Letter, we study the periodogram and weighted phase averager, which are standard solutions in the uniform sampling scenarios, for tackling the problem. It is shown that the estimation performance of both approaches can attain the optimum benchmark of the Cramér-Rao lower bound, although the former technique has a smaller threshold signal-to-noise ratio.

The modified covariance (MC) method provides a computationally attractive and closed-form solution for frequency estimation of a single real sinusoid. In this paper, the performance measures of the MC estimator, namely, mean and mean square error, are derived in closed-form and confirmed by computer simulations.