A modified Gardner detector for symbol timing recovery of M-PSK signals

In this letter, we propose a modified version of the Gardner detector for symbol timing recovery of M-ary phase-shift keying (M-PSK) signals. Simulation results show that the proposed modification leads to significant performance improvement when M-PSK signals are highly bandlimited and M is small. Specifically, the reduction in the level of self-noise due to the modification amounts to 10.7 dB for quaternary phase-shift keying signals with the rolloff factor of 0.25 and the normalized noise-equivalent loop bandwidth of 0.005. In terms of computational complexity involved, the proposed method has an advantage over the known self-noise reduction methods for M-PSK signals with small M.