A frame timing synchronization technique for orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) systems is presented. First, a coarse synchronization technique generates a coarse frame timing estimate. The coarse synchronization technique applies a sliding window differentiator to the output of a conventional auto-correlator to mitigate the plateau effect associated with conventional auto-correlation techniques. Second, a fine synchronization technique generates a fine frame timing estimate. The fine synchronization technique uses the coarse frame timing estimate to reduce the number of cross-correlation calculations. Additionally, the fine synchronization technique acquires a fine frame timing estimate based on a signal-to-interference ratio (SIR) metric, which is more robust to multi-paths and pseudo multi-paths caused by cyclic delay diversity (CDD) schemes than conventional cross-correlation synchronization techniques. A fine-tuning technique generates a desired frame timing estimate by searching a first signal path in a searching window around the fine frame timing estimate to further refine frame timing synchronization.