Symbol Timing Recovery for CPM with Correlated Data Symbols

We consider symbol timing recovery for continuous phase modulations (CPMs) with correlated data symbols. A popular example of such a scheme is shaped offset quadrature phase-shift keying (SOQPSK). We propose an extension to an existing non-data-aided (blind) timing error detector (TED) to make it compatible with such modulation schemes. The merits of the modified TED are demonstrated by comparing its performance with and without taking the data correlation into account. As a further modification, we show that a quantization scheme can be used to yield an extremely low-complexity version of the system with only negligible performance losses. The S-curve of the proposed quantized TED is given, which rules out the existence of false lock points. The proposed scheme shows great promise in a wide range of applications due to its low complexity, its lack of false lock points, and its blind nature; such applications include timing recovery for noncoherent detection schemes and false lock detectors.