  Cooperative diversity systems are wireless communication systems designed to
exploit cooperation among users to mitigate the effects of multipath fading. In
fairly general conditions, it has been shown that these systems can achieve the
diversity order of an equivalent MISO channel and, if the node geometry
permits, virtually the same outage probability can be achieved as that of the
equivalent MISO channel for a wide range of applicable SNR. However, much of
the prior analysis has been performed under the assumption of perfect timing
and frequency offset synchronization. In this paper, we derive the estimation
bounds and associated maximum likelihood estimators for frequency offset
estimation in a cooperative communication system. We show the benefit of
adaptively tuning the frequency of the relay node in order to reduce estimation
error at the destination. We also derive an efficient estimation algorithm,
based on the correlation sequence of the data, which has mean squared error
close to the Cramer-Rao Bound.
