Joint Estimation of Timing and Carrier Phase Offsets for MSK Signals in Alpha-Stable Noise

Abstract

Impulsive noise modeled as symmetric α-stable (SαS) distribution is commonly seen in many practical communication scenarios. In this letter, we focus on the joint timing and carrier phase synchronization of minimum shift keying signals in SαS noise. We first derive the Cramér-Rao lower bound (CRLB) of joint timing and carrier phase offsets estimation. Then, an optimal synchronization training sequence is designed to minimize the CRLB. As the corresponding maximum likelihood estimator is hard to implement in SαS noise, we further propose a pragmatic synchronization parameters estimation algorithm based on explicit myriad cost function and a global optimization method. Extensive simulation results show that our proposed algorithm works well and is robust to the estimation errors of received signal-to-noise ratio and SαS noise parameter.