Systems and methodologies are described that facilitate computing discriminator signals for frequency tracking in wireless communications. The discriminator signal can be computed based at least in part on representations of a received signal shifted upward by a portion of a frequency tone and downward by the portion of the frequency tone. The shifted signals can be summed, and a dot product of the summed signals and a channel estimation of the original signal can be computed to remove uncertain frequency response due to fading. The discriminator signal can be computed as the imaginary portion of the dot product. A frequency error offset can be determined from the discriminator signal and applied to a receiver to tune alignment of the receiver with frequencies of received signals.