Carrier frequency recovery in all-digital modems for burst-mode transmissions

Reliable data detection in time division multiple access (TDMA) communication systems strictly depends on the availability of accurate estimates of the synchronization parameters of the received signal, i.e., carrier frequency/phase and symbol timing, which must be derived from the burst preamble. The authors focus on the carrier frequency estimation aspect, and present a fast, open-loop, all-digital frequency offset estimation technique, whose performance is assessed in two different communication scenarios: a TDMA satellite link employing standard modulation and burst formats, and a mobile cellular terrestrial radio system with signal and channel characteristics obeying the pan-European Group Special Mobile (GSM) recommendations. The use of the algorithm as a frequency error detector (discriminator) in a recursive ("closed-loop") frequency offset estimator is also discussed, and some results concerning both the transient and the steady-state behavior of such a scheme are presented. Finally, the impact of the algorithm on the receiver BER is briefly analyzed.