A comparative study of nondata-aided symbol timing recovery techniques for digital satellite communications

The authors present a unified description of a number of nondata-aided timing recovery algorithms published over a period of 35 years and traces their development from one another. It shows that they are all functionally equivalent and that their performance should therefore be comparable; the main point of comparison is thus in terms of implementation. The most powerful technique so far proposed is that due to S.K. Barton and Y.O. Al-Jalili (see IEEE Colloquium on Advanced Modulation and Coding Techniques for Satellite Comms., Digest number London, 1992, p.3/1-6) which uses frequency domain techniques exclusively for the processing. This represents a radical departure from the earlier algorithms which all use time domain techniques. It is believed that the frequency domain approach to timing recovery and correction exhibits lower computational complexity than the current time domain methods and leads to better performane by using diversity techniques to combine multiple estimates in an optimum fashion