Synchronization in digital wireless radio receivers

Time Division Multiple Access (TDMA) architecture is an established technology for digital cellular, personal and satellite communications, as it supports variable data rate transmission and simplified receiver design. Due to transmission bandwidth restrictions, increasing user demands and the necessity to operate at lower signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), the TDMA systems employ high order modulation schemes such as M-ary Quadrature Amplitude Modulation (M-QAM) and burst transmission. Use of such techniques in low SNR fading channels causes degradations of carrier frequency error, phase rotation error, and symbol timing jitter. To compensate for the severe degradation due to additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) and channel impairments, precise and robust synchronization algorithms are required. This dissertation deals with the synchronization techniques for TDMA receivers using short burst mode transmission with emphasis on preamble-less feedforward synchronization schemes. The objective is to develop new algorithms for symbol timing, carrier frequency offset acquisition, and carrier phase tracking using preamble-less synchronization techniques. To this end, the currently existing synchronization algorithms are surveyed and analyzed. The performance evaluation of the developed algorithms is conducted through Monte-Carlo simulations and theoretical analyses. The statistical properties of the proposed algorithms in AWGN and fading channels are evaluated in terms of the mean and variance of the estimated synchronization errors and their Cramer-Rao lower bounds. Based on the investigation of currently employed feedforward symbol timing algorithms, two new symbol timing recovery schemes are proposed for 16-QAM land mobile signals operating in fading channels. Both schemes achieve better performance in fading channels compared to their existing counterparts without increasing the complexity of the receiver implementation. Further, based on the analysis of currently employed carrier offset and carrier phase recovery algorithms, two new algorithms are proposed for carrier acquisition and carrier tracking of mobile satellite systems utilizing short TDMA bursts with large frequency offsets. The proposed algorithms overcome some of the conventional problems associated with currently employed carrier recovery schemes in terms of capture range, speed of convergence, and stability.