On the design of a common avenue for frequency estimation and frame synchronization

Frame synchronization and frequency estimation have historically been completely separate problems in digital receiver design. Here, a common avenue is discovered and transformed into practical algorithms. The proposed approach is based on the adoption of a differential post detection integration (DPDI) scheme for the acquisition of the unique word marking the beginning of the frame. The DPDI decision variable can indeed be used also for frequency estimation purposes, with very limited complexity. The adoption of a modular preamble structure with a two stage detector is also proposed to improve performance and optimize the detector structure. Performance is studied through simulations and analysis, providing closed form expressions for the estimation error variance. Both simulations and analysis show that the proposed joint approach is able to provide estimation performance close to the Cramer-Rao bound, as well as practically error-free frame synchronization, with very limited complexity