Symbol-timing synchronization in space-time coding systems using orthogonal training sequences

A new symbol-timing estimator for space-time coding systems is proposed. It improves the conventional algorithm of Naguib et al. such that accurate timing estimates can be obtained even if the oversampling ratio is small (such as oversampling ratio Q=4). The increase in implementation complexity with respect to that of the conventional algorithm is very small. The requirements and the design procedures for the training sequences are discussed. Analytical and simulation results show that the estimation mean square error of the proposed estimator is significantly smaller than that of the conventional algorithm.