Iterative symbol timing recovery for short burst transmission schemes

This paper presents a novel iterative symbol timing recovery (STR) scheme for short burst transmission formats, a paradigm commonly found in modern wireless systems, like, for instance, time division multiple access (TDMA) schemes and future wireless packet data networks. Both data-aided (DA) and decision-directed (DD) solutions are considered and performance is pursued by means of an iterative burst-by-burst scheme which exploits the Farrow structure for the polynomial interpolation filter. The convergence of the algorithm is discussed according to the expectation maximization (EM) framework. Performance is evaluated by simulating 4-QAM and 16-QAM transceivers and simulations results are compared under different modulation orders and channel conditions, for both the decision-directed and data-aided cases.