The Cramer-Rao bound for phase estimation from coded linearly modulated signals

In this letter, we express the Cramer-Rao bound (CRB) for carrier phase estimation from a noisy linearly modulated signal with encoded data symbols, in terms of the marginal a posteriori probabilities (APPs) of the coded symbols. For a wide range of classical codes (block codes, convolutional codes, and trellis-coded modulation), these marginal APPs can be computed efficiently by means of the Bahl-Cocke-Jelinke-Raviv (BCJR) algorithm, whereas for codes that involve interleaving (turbo codes and bit interleaved coded modulation), iterated application of the BCJR algorithm is required. Our numerical results show that when the BER of the coded system is less than about 10/sup -3/, the resulting CRB is essentially the same as when transmitting a training sequence.