Distinction of OFDM signals from single carrier signals is highly important
for adaptive receiver algorithms and signal identification applications. OFDM
signals exhibit Gaussian characteristics in time domain and fourth order
cumulants of Gaussian distributed signals vanish in contrary to the cumulants
of other signals. Thus fourth order cumulants can be utilized for OFDM signal
identification. In this paper, first, formulations of the estimates of the
fourth order cumulants for OFDM signals are provided. Then it is shown these
estimates are affected significantly from the wireless channel impairments,
frequency offset, phase offset and sampling mismatch. To overcome these
problems, a general chi-square constant false alarm rate Gaussianity test which
employs estimates of cumulants and their covariances is adapted to the specific
case of wireless OFDM signals. Estimation of the covariance matrix of the
fourth order cumulants are greatly simplified peculiar to the OFDM signals. A
measurement setup is developed to analyze the performance of the identification
method and for comparison purposes. A parametric measurement analysis is
provided depending on modulation order, signal to noise ratio, number of
symbols, and degree of freedom of the underlying test. The proposed method
outperforms statistical tests which are based on fixed thresholds or empirical
values, while a priori information requirement and complexity of the proposed
method are lower than the coherent identification techniques
