Novel preamble-aided symbol timing estimation for burst communication

Burst data transmission is widely used in wireless communications. Rapid and robust symbol timing is critical for burst communication and it has a great impact on the performance of subsequent demodulation and the whole system. Feed-forward symbol timing has the advantage of fast convergence and it is very suitable for burst communication. Feed-forward symbol timing estimation, generally speaking, can be classified into two broad categories: non-data-aided symbol timing estimation and data-aided symbol timing estimation. In this paper we present a novel data-aided symbol timing estimation. The symbol timing offset estimation is based on the cross correlation output of the preamble and square processing is utilized, which is similar to the non-data-aided symbol timing. The proposed estimation exhibits good performance with low complexity. Besides, it is shown by computer simulations that the method is not sensitive to roll-off factor and works well at low SNR.