Phase-domain blind estimation of symbol duration based on Haar wavelet transform

A phase-domain blind estimator of symbol duration based on Haar wavelet transform (HWT) is proposed. It can estimate the symbol duration of phase modulated signals, such as M-ary phase-shift keying (MPSK) signals and polyphase coded signals. The closed form of the spectrum of HWT is derived. Theoretical analysis shows the frequency of the first spectral peak is equal to the symbol rate, which is the reciprocal of symbol duration. Thus the symbol duration can be extracted from the spectrum. Subsequently, the optimum wavelet scale is determined according to the maximum output signal to noise ratio (OSNR) criterion. MATLAB simulations show that this algorithm can blindly estimate the symbol duration without any prior knowledge. This estimator need not estimate the carrier frequency and has the characteristics of low computation complexity and high accuracy.