A Unified Approach to Optimum Frame Synchronization

In this paper, we present a unified approach for optimum frame synchronization where the observed symbols are modeled as the output of a Markov chain corrupted by additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN). This model encompasses many different frame synchronization situations e.g., convolutionally coded transmissions and nonlinear modulations with memory, such as continuous-phase modulation. The proposed frame synchronizer is implemented with trellis path search used for Markov chain decoding and provides better performance than conventional synchronizers because it is able to exploit coding gain. The proposed synchronizer includes many previously proposed synchronizers either as special cases or as suboptimal approximations. The numerical results show the performance gain of the proposed frame synchronizer for convolutional codes with linear modulation, transmission over known intersymbol-interference channels, and nonlinear continuous-phase modulation signals. The proposed frame synchronizer is derived for the case of continuous transmission but may also be applied to certain packet transmission scenarios