BLIND FEEDFORWARD SYMBOL TIMING ESTIMATION WITH PSK SIGNALS

This paper deals with the problem of blind symbol timing estima-tion with M-ary phase-shift keying signals. A least-squares (LS) estimator exploiting the structure of the received signal when the convolution of the transmitter’s signaling pulse and the receiver fil-ter satisfies the Nyquist criterion, is proposed. Since the derived LS algorithm requires a maximization with respect to a continuous variable, a closed-form approximate LS (ALS) algorithm, suitable for digital implementation, is proposed. Computer simulation re-sults show that with small excess bandwidth factors the derived ALS algorithm outperforms previously proposed algorithms at moderate and high signal-to-noise ratios. 1