A new approach for evaluating the performance of a symbol timing recovery system employing a general type of nonlinearity

A new technique is presented for evaluating the jitter performance of a symbol timing recovery (STR) subsystem for binary synchronous data transmission systems. The STR system consists of any even-symmetric zero-memory nonlinear device followed by a narrowband filter tuned to the pulse repetition frequency. The exact analytical expressions are derived for the mean and the mean-squared values of the timing wave, based on the high-order moments of the input signal. The root-mean-square jitter performance is then computed as a function of various system parameters such as the power series expansion of the zero-memory nonlinear device, prefiltering, and postfiltering. The numerical results obtained from some specific examples serve to illustrate several aspects of the timing recovery problem