Iterative Frame Synchronization for Frequency-Selective Channels

Iterative receiver techniques provide a powerful tool to enhance receiver performance and are gradually becoming the norm in modern communication systems. Although they have been used in various receiver components like channel estimation, equalization and decoding, they have not been explicitly applied to frame synchronization. In this paper, we propose an efficient iterative frame synchronization technique in which the hard-output, un-coded data at the output of the equalizer is utilized to improve the accuracy of synchronization. Simulation results show huge signal-to-noise-ratio (SNR) gains in terms of false acquisition probability (FAP), mean square channel estimation error (MSCEE) and un-coded bit error rate (BER) at all SNR values. The proposed approach can be easily applied to continuous or burst type frame synchronization under additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) in addition to flat or frequency-selective channels