One of the principal disadvantages of Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) is very sensitive to carrier frequency offset. The integer frequency offset has no effect on the orthogonality among the subcarriers, but it causes a circular shift and phase rotation of the received data symbols sequence, resulting in a Bit Error Rate(BER) of 0.5. In this paper,a novel integer frequency offset estimator for OFDM is derived based on maximum likelihood estimation technique and exploration of the differential relation between two consecutive OFDM data symbol sequences in frequency domain. Its performance is compared with the conventional method by computer simulations for the additive white Gaussian noise channel and a multipath fading channel. Simulation results show that the performance of the proposed estimator is better than the conventional estimator.