Blind Symbol-Rate Estimation for Short and Bursty Communications

The design of a blind receiver for unsynchronized bursty communications is a challenging task, especially when the data burst duration is very short and the over-sampling ratio (OSR) at the receiver is a non-integer value. In this article, the problem of blind symbol-rate estimation for bursty communications is studied. A cyclostationary method with bias removal (CS-BR) is proposed to improve the accuracy of the "OSR peak " detection in cyclostationary method when the length of signal burst is very short. Factors which affect the accuracy of the proposed blind symbol-rate estimation are thoroughly analyzed. Both field measurement data simulations and Monte Carlo simulations show that by using our proposed CS-BR method, the accuracy of blind symbol-rate estimation can be significantly improved, and the root-mean-square-error of the estimated OSR can be reduced to as small as 10(-4) even if each short data burst consists of only tens of symbols.