A new symbol timing and carrier frequency offset estimation algorithm for noncoherent orthogonal M-CPFSK

We present a new joint symbol timing and carrier frequency offset estimation algorithm for noncoherent orthogonal continuous-phase M-ary frequency-shift keying (M-CPFSK). Our algorithm performs nondata-aided feedforward processing of finite-length observations, and it is suited for an all-digital modem implementation based on a DSP or an ASIC processor. The algorithm exploits phase continuity of M-CPFSK in order to generate both a spectral component at the carrier frequency offset and a timing error signal. This is obtained without nonlinear transformations of the received signal involving noise×noise products. Thus, our algorithm can operate at a very low input signal-to-noise ratio. We discuss the operating range of our algorithm, and we show that no additional overhead (training sequence) in excess of the standard overhead of FDMA/TDMA packet transmission is required to resolve timing and frequency ambiguities. Moreover, we show that by differentially preceding the transmitted symbols, it is possible to eliminate automatically frequency ambiguities, at the price of a slight increase in the bit-error rate. An approximate mean-square error analysis of the estimators and simulation results prove that our algorithm provides good performance, even with a relatively short observation block length and large carrier frequency offset. Computer simulations show also that our algorithm is extremely robust to phase noise. These features make our algorithm a good candidate for satellite FDMA/TDMA applications in the 20-30 GHz band, with a large number of users and bursty transmission