Kurtosis-Based Symbol Timing and Carrier Phase/Frequency Tracking

Entropy (Basel). 2021 Jun 27;23(7):819. doi: 10.3390/e23070819.

Abstract

Kurtosis is known to be effective at estimating signal timing and carrier phase offset when the processing is performed in a "burst mode," that is, operating on a block of received signal in an offline fashion. In this paper, kurtosis-based estimation is extended to provide tracking of timing and carrier phase, and frequency offsets. The algorithm is compared with conventional PLL-type timing/phase estimation and shown to be superior in terms of speed of convergence, with comparable variance in the matched filter output symbols.

Keywords: carrier frequency; carrier phase estimation; kurtosis; offset estimation; symbol timing estimation.