Joint carrier phase and symbol timing synchronization for burst satellite communications

This paper presents an estimation scheme for joint carrier and symbol clock acquisition using a preamble based on the maximum likelihood principle. Using this principle, the symbol-timing estimate is first obtained by solving a one-dimensional optimization problem. The carrier phase trajectory can then be estimated using the obtained symbol timing and the frequency outset is extracted from the carrier phase trajectory using a least mean square error approach. The obtained carrier and symbol clock synchronizer is evaluated via computer simulation. The corresponding performance is compared with the Cramer-Rao bound. Since most of the maximum-likelihood synchronization work in the current literature only focuses on a single parameter estimation scheme, this paper provides a unified approach for joint carrier phase frequency offset and clock synchronization