Joint symbol detection and timing estimation with stochastic M-algorithm

In digital communications, the symbol timing estimation is an very important element for high quality data detection. This paper considers the problem of joint symbol detection and timing estimation, whose optimal solution is analytically intractable. In this paper, a stochastic M-algorithm is proposed for the solution. The stochastic M-algorithm is a novel efficient particle filtering algorithm designed for discrete unknowns. To accommodate, in the stochastic M-algorithm, the continuous unknown symbol timing, the unscented Kalman filter is introduced, which leads to a very efficient implementation. The simulation results illustrated that the stochastic M-algorithm achieves similar performance to particle filtering with less than 1/25 of the complexity.