Coding for both protection and synchronisation

The majority of the classical methods for synchronisation for digital communications systems require a hardware overhead and additional data added to the information stream to provide effective synchronisation. The paper discusses recent advances which offer alternatives to these existing methods. A novel synchronisation technique which utilises auxiliary information obtained from the soft maximum likelihood trellis decoding (SMLD) of the received signal, to obtain bit, symbol and block synchronisation, is described which combines the operations of the decoder, demodulator and synchronisation system