Computationally efficient online phase-based frequency estimation of a single tone

Computationally efficient estimation of the frequency of a single complex sinusoid in white Gaussian noise is an important problem in a wide variety of applications. A variety of low-cost batch-processing methods, the so-called phase-based frequency estimators, have been proposed during the recent decades. Although quite efficient in offline data processing, these algorithms are ill-suited for online estimation, as they require the reprocessing of the entire data with each new measurement. In this work, we develop a time-recursive phase-based estimator that is statistically efficient and computationally well-suited for online processing of data.