Carrier and time synchronization

Abstract

Mismatch in both time and frequency between communication sides is inevitable, and the receiver must be synchronized with the transmitter; otherwise, the performance of the system is degraded severely if it operates at all. This chapter addresses carrier and time synchronizations and advances the conventional receiver structure further to include those functionalities. It discusses signal modeling and the effects of impairments. The main target of this chapter is synchronization for lab equipment, i.e. software defined radio equipment, and since the processed signals given to and returned by these devices are baseband signals, the focus is on the baseband signal modeling. The chapter addresses carrier phase error where feedback and feedforward compensation techniques are presented. Time synchronization is considered, where both frame edge detection and downsampling problems are addressed. For downsampling, both feedback and feedforward methods are shown.