Joint Frequency and Timing Recovery for MSK-Type Modulation

We investigate a novel nondata-aided method for jointly estimating timing and carrier frequency offset in MSK-type modulation. The algorithm has a feedforward structure and lends itself to a simple digital implementation. Its estimation accuracy depends on a design parameter that may be varied to trade performance for computational complexity. Setting the parameter to unity yields a synchronization scheme already known in the literature. Computer simulations are used to assess the synchronizer performance on AWGN Rayleigh fading channels with MSK and Gaussian MSK modulation.