An improved figure of merit for symbol synchronisers

The contribution of this paper is to derive a novel figure of merit that can be measured in practice for symbol synchronisers. It is used to estimate the probability of symbol error, including the effect of symbol slip, for different frame and signaling alphabet sizes. The new figure of merit proves to provide a significantly more accurate characterisation than previously published methods. Specifically, by applying the novel figure of merit, the paper compares the symbol synchronisation performance of a conventional digital phase locked loop (DPLL) symbol synchroniser with that of modulation-derived synchroniser (MDS) under additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) channel conditions