Closed-Form Expressions for the Exact Cramér–Rao Bounds of Timing Recovery Estimators From BPSK, MSK and Square-QAM Transmissions

In this paper, we derive for the first time analytical expressions for the exact Cramér–Rao lower bounds (CRLB) for symbol timing recovery of binary phase shift keying (BPSK), minimum shift keying (MSK), and square QAM-modulated signals. It is assumed that the transmitted data are completely unknown at the receiver and that the shaping pulse verifies the first Nyquist criterion. Moreover the carrier phase and frequency are considered as unknown nuisance parameters. The time delay remains constant over the observation interval and the received signal is corrupted by additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN). Our new expressions prove that the achievable performance holds irrespective of the true time delay value. Moreover, they corroborate previous attempts to empirically compute the considered bounds thereby enabling their immediate evaluation.