New maximum likelihood based frequency estimator for digital receivers

Recently, a new all-digital technique for symbol timing and carrier phase synchronization of digital receivers was introduced by the authors. The's technique is based on a polynomial approximation of the likelihood function by using the Farrow structure. In this contribution, we propose a new Tretter-based frequency estimator that is directly derived from the carrier phase estimate. The proposed estimator is simple to implement and is particularly suited for digital receiver architectures. This new Tretter-based estimator performs fairly well when compared with the Fitz and the Luise-Reggiannini frequency estimators, in the presence of substantial carrier frequency offset.