Low-Complexity Joint CFO and Channel Estimation for RIS-aided OFDM Systems

Abstract: Accurate channel estimation is essential for achieving the performance gains offered by reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS)-aided wireless communications. A variety of channel estimation methods have been proposed for such systems; however, none of the existing methods takes into account the effect of synchronization errors such as carrier frequency offset (CFO). In general, CFO can significantly degrade channel estimation performance of orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) systems. Motivated by this, we investigate the effect of CFO on channel estimation for RIS-aided OFDM systems. Furthermore, we propose a joint CFO and channel impulse response (CIR) estimation method for these systems. Simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method, and also demonstrate that the use of time-domain rather than frequency-domain estimation in this context results in an improvement in the mean-squared error (MSE) performance of channel estimation as well as a significantly lower overall computational complexity.