Performance Limits on Joint Estimation of Frequency Offset, Channel and Noise Variance in Aeronautical Telemetry

Abstract

Modern digital communication techniques leverage the capabilities of advanced digital signal processing to improve the bit error rate performance of modulated carrier in harsh radio frequency (RF) environments. This improvement requires the knowledge of the RF environment (e.g., frequency offset, multipath channel coefficients, noise variance). In this paper we derive the theoretical performance bound of the joint frequency offset, channel and noise variance estimators. Performance of the joint maximum likelihood estimators are compared with this bound for two of the measured aeronautical telemetry channels with iNET-formatted SOQPSK-TG samples.