Optimal Pilot Symbol Distribution for Efficient and Low-Complexity Doppler-Shift and Doppler-Rate Estimation in Bursty Transmission

Due to relative motion between the transmitter and the receiver, the carrier of the received signal in digital burst- mode transmission can be affected by Doppler distortion. This contribution deals with the problem of optimizing the burst format of packet transmission to perform enhanced-accuracy joint estimation of carrier Doppler-shift and Doppler-rate. Optimal pilot symbol distributions that minimize the Doppler- shift and the Doppler-rate Cramer-Rao bounds (CRBs) for the joint estimation of carrier phase/Doppler-shift and of Doppler-rate are obtained, and a new data aided (DA) estimation algorithm suitable for each distribution is first derived and then evaluated by analysis and by simulation, exhibiting that such low-complex estimation schemes reach their relevant CRBs even at very low values of signal-to-noise ratio.