  Universal filtered multi-carrier (UFMC), which groups and filters subcarriers
before transmission, is a potential multi-carrier modulation technique
investigated for the emerging Machine-Type Communications (MTC). Considering
the relaxed timing synchronization requirement of UFMC, we design a novel joint
timing synchronization and channel estimation method for multi-user UFMC uplink
transmission. Aiming at reducing overhead for higher system performance, the
joint estimation problem is formulated using atomic norm minimization that
enhances the sparsity of timing offset in the continuous frequency domain.
Simulation results show that the proposed method can achieve considerable
performance gain, as compared with its counterparts.
