Per-survivor timing recovery for uncoded partial response channels

A conventional receiver performs timing recovery and equalization separately. Specifically, conventional timing recovery is based on a phase-locked loop that relies on the decision provided by its own symbol detector. We propose a new timing recovery scheme based on per-survivor processing (PSP) that jointly performs timing recovery and equalization for uncoded partial response channels. In the proposed scheme, each survivor of the Viterbi algorithm maintains its own estimate of the timing offset, and this estimate is updated according to the history data associated with the survivor path. As compared to conventional timing recovery at BER = 10^-4, the proposed scheme can provide a 0.5 dB gain in SNR.