A novel cell search scheme for OFDM cellular systems is proposed. It is based on one OFDM symbol with several identical slots as preamble, the time domain repetition structure of which can be utilized to accomplish OFDM timing/frequency synchronization. The cell ID is comprised of two parts: a sub-carrier mask index g and a sequence index x. Each sub-carrier mask activates or deactivates some of the sub-carriers, after which a differentially coded sequence is loaded on pairs of the adjacent active sub-carriers. The user equipment (UE) recognizes the mask with index g via power detection of the received frequency domain signal. Then it estimates the index x from differential demodulation followed by detection of the frequency domain se-quence. In order to improve the performance, a method of jointly estimating g and x is devised. Simulation results showed that the proposed scheme is able to support a very large number of cell IDs while maintaining a good performance even in bad multi-cell environment.
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