A hybrid carrier synchronization scheme for PSK burst-mode communication systems

In this paper, a hybrid synchronization technique applied to burst-mode communication is proposed. A synchronization technique is to estimate carrier frequency and phase offsets in a noisy channel environment. A fundamental problem for estimating the parameters (carrier phase and frequency offsets) in burst-mode transmission is that the ways of pursuing estimation accuracy and transmission efficiency are always trade-off. To solve this problem, a hybrid carrier recovery technique is proposed to improve the transmission efficiency with reliable performance especially at low S/N. In the proposed technique, the synchronization parameters are first estimated based on a data-aided feed-forward estimation scheme. Then, a phase tracker using decision-directed DPLL estimates the phase offset for the data portion of the burst data. From simulation results, it shows fast synchronization with shorter preamble maintaining reasonable BER performance at low S/N.