Design and Development of a Burst Acquisition System for Geosynchronous Satcom Channels

The key contribution of this work is to develop transmitter and receiver algorithms in discrete-time for turbocoded offset QPSK signals. The proposed synchronization and detection techniques perform effectively at an SNR per bit close to 1.5 dB, in the presence of a frequency offset as large as 30 % of the symbol-rate and a clock offset of 25 ppm (parts per million). Due to the use of up-sampling and matched filtering and a feedforward approach, the acquisition time for clock recovery is just equal to the length of the preamble. The carrier recovery algorithm does not exhibit any phase ambiguity, alleviating the need for differentially encoding the data at the transmitter. The proposed techniques are well suited for discrete-time implementation. Index Terms Offset QPSK (quadrature phase shift keying), frequency offset, clock offset, synchronization, matched filtering, additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN).