Blind symbol rate estimation: a two stage algorithm

Blind symbol rate estimation is performed in three stages; coarse estimation, fine estimation and timing recovery. In this paper, a two stage algorithm is proposed to estimate the symbol rate for raised cosine pulse shaped linearly modulated single carrier signals in slightly dispersive channels. The first stage of the algorithm is based on inverse Fourier transform (IFT) followed by a polynomial fitting block. The performance of the algorithm increases with larger oversampling rates. The performance of the algorithm is considerably good for low signal-to-noise (SNR) values. The second stage of the algorithm is the fine estimation stage and cyclic correlation based algorithm is used for this purpose. The performance of the cyclic correlation based method with low excess bandwidth conditions is increased using the estimation from the first stage and the success rate of the estimation block is increased to 100% even for low excess bandwidths. The third stage of the algorithm consists of timing recovery algorithms. Since we do not have specific contributions in this area, those kind of algorithms will not be discussed in this work. The simulation results of the proposed algorithm are compared to the algorithms available in the literature.