Carrier and phase recovery for coded systems using a preamble sequence with reliability information over AWGN channels

Channel coding is an integral part of most data communication systems. However, most existing carrier synchronization algorithms do not take advantage of the redundancy introduced in the data stream by the code and operate at an uncoded SNR which can be significantly lower than the coded SNR. Thus, whereas it used to be the case that if detection could be achieved reliably, so could synchronization, this may not be true any more for heavily coded systems. We introduce an approximate maximum likelihood estimator that incorporates the code structure in obtaining phase estimates. Simulation results show the performance of the introduced algorithm is significantly better than those which do not make use of the code structure.