Abstract
A simple method for frequency estimation of a PSK-modulated carrier in complex additive white Gaussian noise is proposed. Although this feedforward pilot-aided technique is sub-optimal in terms of the Cramer-Rao bound (CRB) for one pilot field, its performance greatly improves (in comparison to some established methods) when used over consecutive pilot fields. At low signal-to-noise ratios (SNR) where there is an inherent use of averaging over consecutive pilot fields to achieve the required estimation accuracy, this method achieves a similar speed and accuracy to Luise and Reggiannini (L&R)'s method for fine frequency recovery but with a significantly lower complexity. It also provides a competitive speed and accuracy for coarse frequency offset estimation without a threshold region as associated with Kay's method. Simulations have been run based on the DVB-S2 standard (with all examined methods benefiting from the averaging over multiple pilot fields) and the results are presented. © 2007 by the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Inc. All rights reserved.