Burst Transmission Symbol Synchronization in the Presence of Cycle Slip Arising from Different Clock Frequencies

Abstract: In digital communication systems different clock frequencies of transmitter and receiver usually is translated into cycle slips. Receivers might experience different sampling frequencies from transmitter due to manufacturing imperfection, Doppler Effect introduced by channel or wrong estimation of symbol rate. Timing synchronization in presence of cycle slip for a burst sequence of received information, leads to severe degradation in system performance that represents as shortening or prolonging of bit stream. Therefor the necessity of prior detection and elimination of cycle slip is unavoidable. Accordingly, the main idea introduced in this paper is to employ the Gardner Detector (GAD) not only to recover a fixed timing offset, its output is also processed in a way such that timing drifts can be estimated and corrected. Deriving a two steps algorithm, eliminates the cycle slips arising from wrong estimation of symbol rate firstly, and then iteratively synchronize symbol timing of a burst received signal by applying GAD to a feed forward structure with the additional benefits that convergence and stability problems are avoided, as they are typical for feedback schemes normally used by GAD. The proposed algorithm is able to compensate considerable symbol rate offsets at the receiver side. Considerable results in terms of BER confirm the algorithm proficiency.