Doppler-rate estimation for burst digital transmission

We propose a new algorithm for Doppler rate estimation in burst-mode phase shift keying (PSK) transmissions. This issue may arise in mobile radio links when the received signal experiences significant time-varying Doppler distortion, as in low-earth-orbit satellite systems. The algorithm is based on the transmission of a training sequence and has a feedforward structure that is easy to implement in digital form. Its estimation accuracy is close to the Cramer-Rao bound even at SNR values as low as 0 dB. Comparisons with earlier methods are discussed.