OPTIMUM DELAY AND SEQUENCE ESTIMATION FROM INCOMPLETE DATA

The performance of digital communication systems can be degraded severely when symbol synchronization is imperfect. This is due to the contamination of the decision statistics computed by the receiver from neighboring symbols and the inability of some conventional receivers to combat this interference. This inability often is due to the design of conventional receivers, which assumes that the timing information provided by the synchronization subsystem is perfect. An easily implementable dynamic programming algorithm is introduced which estimates sequences and timing delay jointly from the contaminated decision statistics available to the receiver. The new algorithm alleviates the need for a symbol synchronizer, it is easily implemented digitally, and it is quite robust to timing errors. 1990 IEEE

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