Synchronization of bursty offset QPSK signals in the presence of frequency offset and noise

This paper deals with the problem of synchronization of bursty offset QPSK signals in the presence of frequency offset and additive white Gaussian noise. The main tasks of the receiver are to detect a burst (a frame of data) with a low acquisition time, to estimate and cancel the frequency and phase offset (carrier recovery), perform timing recovery, matched filtering and finally recover the data such that the bit-error-rate (BER) is close to the theoretical limit. The key contribution of this paper is to develop synchronization techniques in discrete-time that perform effectively even at signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) close to 0 dB in additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) channels. These techniques are well suited for implementation on a digital signal processing (DSP) platform.