Joint oversampled carrier and time-delay synchronization in digital communications with large excess bandwidth

This paper deals with the joint estimation of the pair dynamical carrier phase/Doppler shift and the time-delay in a digital receiver. We consider a Binary Offset Carrier shaping function as used in satellite positioning, which is a time-limited pulse with a large excess bandwidth, and a Data Aided synchronization scenario, where we have a constant time-delay and a Brownian phase evolution with a linear drift. The proposed study is relative to the use of an oversampled signal model after matched filtering, leading to a colored reception noise and a non-stationary power signal. The contribution of this paper is twofold. First, we derive the Hybrid Cramér–Rao Bound for the joint phase/Doppler estimation problem. Then, we propose a method for the joint time-delay/carrier synchronization, which couples an Extended Kalman Filter and an Expectation-Maximization type algorithm. Our numerical results show the potential gain of using the oversampled signal for carrier synchronization, obtaining better performances than using a classical synchronizer, and good time-delay estimation.

► Joint carrier and time-delay synchronization problem in satellite communications.
► Oversampled signal, DA scenario and BOC modulation.
► Iterative solution coupling an EKF and an EM-type algorithm.
► Associated hybrid Cramér–Rao bound as a benchmark.