1. Introduction
The recent progress in the field of channel coding, highlighted by the success of turbo-codes and low-density parity-check codes, led to the design of systems intending to operate at ever-decreasing signal to noise ratios (SNR). In particular, the new standards DVB-RCS [1] and DVB-S2 [2] developed for satellite multimedia telecommunication systems involve very performant coding schemes suited to the additive white Gaussian noise (AWON) channel. The problem of carrier synchronization is critical in such situation (very low SNR, phase noise, frequency deviation.), especially for transmission schemes involving high-order phase modulations.