Blockwise Joint Detection of Physical Cell Identity and Carrier Frequency Offset for Narrowband IoT Applications

Abstract

This paper presents a novel formulation for detecting the secondary synchronization signal in a narrowband Internet of Things communication system. The proposed approach is supported by a noncoherent algorithm that eliminates the need for channel information. A robust joint synchronization scheme is developed by decoupling the estimations of the physical cell identity and the carrier frequency offset. We derive the detection probability of the proposed physical cell identity detector and the mean squared error of the carrier frequency offset estimator, demonstrating their accuracy through simulation results. The performance of the proposed detection scheme is compared with that of existing detection schemes in terms of both estimation accuracy and computational complexity. Experimental results confirm that the proposed synchronization method exhibits superior performance while maintaining relatively lower complexity compared with benchmark methods.