• Fading
• Wireless
• PSAM
• Frame Synchronization

Pilot Symbol Assisted Modulation (PSAM) is a good method to compensate for the channel fading effect in wireless mobile communications. In PSAM, known pilot symbols are periodically inserted into the transmitted data symbol stream and the receiver uses these symbols to derive amplitude and phase reference.

One aspect of this procedure, which has not received much attention yet, is the frame synchronization, i.e. the method used by the receiver to locate the time position of the pilot symbols. In this study, two novel non-coherent frame synchronization methods are introduced in which only the magnitude of received signal is used to obtain the timing of the pilot symbol. The methods are evaluated for both AWGN and frequency non-selective slow Rayleigh fading channels.

One synchronization technique is derived by standard maximum likelihood (ML) estimation formulation, and the other is obtained by using maximum a Posteriori probability (MAP) with a threshold test. Signal processing in the receiver uses simplifying approximations that rely on relatively high signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) as consistent with the reception of 16-QAM. Computer simulation has been used to test the acquisition time performance and the probability of false acquisition. Several lengths and patterns of pilot symbol sequences were tested where every 10th symbol was a pilot symbol and all other symbols were randomly selected data symbols. When compared with the other published synchronizers, results from this study show better performance in both AWGN and fading channels. Significantly better performance is observed in the presence of receiver frequency offsets.