ON CARRIER FREQUENCY AND PHASE SYNCHRONIZATION FOR CODED 16-APSK IN AERONAUTICAL MOBILE TELEMETRY

Abstract

This paper examines the problem of carrier phase and frequency estimation for coded 16-APSK in aeronautical mobile telemetry. Given the fact that coded systems tend to operate at lower signalto-noise ratios than uncoded systems, the synchronizer must operate at these lower signal-to-noise ratios. For a 30 kHz frequency offset and a 10 Mbit/s 16-APSK signal, the conventional phase lock loop (PLL) system does not achieve consistent lock to be a useful approach. Consequently, a blind feed-forward approach, based on the FFT, and an initialized feedback approach based on the PLL were examined. The feed-forward estimator is capable of achieving BER ideal performance for Eb/N0 ≥ 6 dB using 1024 symbols. The feedback estimator, initialized using a feed-forward estimate based on 1024 symbols is also capable of achieving BER ideal performance for Eb/N0 ≥ 6 dB. Both synchronizers require a sufficiently good blind estimate: the estimate based on 2014 symbols appears to be the minimum value to achieve good performance.