Patent ID: 8265184

Claim:
A method of operating an orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) receiver for estimating a residual carrier frequency offset in an OFDM signal received by the OFDM receiver after most of the carrier frequency offset has been removed from the received signal, comprising: sequentially receiving a Fast Fourier Transform of a pair of OFDM symbols embodied in the signal received by the OFDM receiver; for each of the respective OFDM symbols in the pair, computing a channel frequency response for pilot subcarriers output by the Fast Fourier Transform, and assigning a channel frequency response of zero to data subcarriers output by the Fast Fourier Transform; performing an Inverse Fast Fourier Transform on the channel frequency responses for the respective OFDM symbols in the pair to obtain a channel impulse response for each OFDM symbol; estimating a phase difference between the channel impulse response computed for the respective OFDM symbols in the pair; and estimating the residual carrier frequency offset using the estimated phase difference.