Kurtosis-Based Symbol Timing and Carrier Phase/Frequency Tracking

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.