An improved timing compensation scheme for multi-level VSB receivers

This paper presents an improved timing compensation scheme to enhance the performance of multi-level VSB receivers. Long and short ghosts may cause both timing-offsets and carrier phase offsets in the multi-level VSB receivers. Consequently, they may induce errors to search the frame headers. The timing method using the Nyquist sidebands can be used to efficiently acquire the sampling frequency offset. However, the timing loop may also suffer from the carrier phase offsets. In this paper, the square-sum of both components of the channel correlation output is adopted to find the frame headers; and it also be used to compensate the residual timing-offsets. The proposed compensation scheme is free from the carrier phase offset. Simulations show the performance of the VSB receivers has been improved in poorly fading multi-path channels.