A FAMILY OF REAL SINGLE-TONE FREQUENCY ESTIMATORS

In this paper, the problem of frequency estimation of a single si-nusoid immersed in white noise is addressed. Inspired by the Pis-arenko Harmonic Decomposer (PHD) estimator, which makes use of the sample covariance of the observations with lags 1 and 2, we propose a family of estimators using higher lags p and 2p of the sample covariance. The proposed estimator outperforms the PHD, except for frequencies close to the edges kpi/p. As a means to sidestep this problem, two different estimators with different lags can be appropriately combined. A statistical analysis of the pro-posed method in terms of the Mean Square Error of the frequency estimate is presented. Computer simulations are included to val-idate the theoretical analysis of the novel estimator and to com-pare its performance to that of PHD and to the Cramer-Rao Lower Bound. 1