Advanced Iterative Symbol Timing Recovery for Mobile DVB-RCS

In this paper the symbol timing estimation problem is addressed for bursty transmission in mobile satellite communications. In particular, a classical approach and iterative techniques are compared in terms of estimation performance. The iterative techniques are based on the expectation-maximization approach and they exploit the soft a-posteriori data information delivered by the iterative decoder in order to aid the synchronization process. A new iterative approach is here proposed with the aim to overcome the biased results observed on exiting algorithms for large timing offset values.