Unified Frame Acquisition and Symbol Timing Estimation for CPM Return Link Transmission

This paper tackles the problem of unified frame and symbol timing synchronization for the return link of a DVB satellite system with Continuous Phase Modulation. Robust schemes are introduced to cope with the carrier frequency uncertainty affecting the received signal. The novel approach employs the same detector to recover the frame alignment and the symbol synchronism, based on Post Detection Integration strategy. It is shown that this unified approach is able to provide quasi-optimal performance limiting complexity at the same time.