Blind Joint Timing and Carrier Phase Estimation in Burst-Type CPM

The application of short burst transmission, e.g. in frequency hopping systems requires a repeating acquisition of channel impairment parameters. In this work, a blind joint timing and carrier phase estimation of continuous phase modulation bursts is realized by the expectation maximization algorithm. The main contribution is the formulation of the expectation and maximization steps to enable an efficient computation and a simple joint maximization of the parameters, respectively. The joint estimator's performance in terms of the mean square error is shown to achieve the theoretical limits, i.e. the modified Cramér-Rao-Vector-Bound and is compared to the perfectly synchronized receiver in terms of bit and frame error rates. Its computational complexity is discussed qualitatively and some approaches are mentioned to decrease it further.