  Conventional correlation-based frame synchronization techniques can suffer
significant performance degradation over multi-path frequency-selective
channels. As a remedy, in this paper we consider joint frame synchronization
and channel estimation. This, however, increases the length of the resulting
combined channel and its estimation becomes more challenging. On the other
hand, since the combined channel is a sparse vector, sparse channel estimation
methods can be applied. We propose a joint frame synchronization and channel
estimation method using the orthogonal matching pursuit (OMP) algorithm which
exploits the sparsity of the combined channel vector. Subsequently, the channel
estimate is used to design the equalizer. Our simulation results and
experimental outcomes using software defined radios show that the proposed
approach improves the overall system performance in terms of the mean square
error (MSE) between the transmitted and the equalized symbols compared to the
conventional method.
