On Symbol Timing Recovery in All-digital Receivers

Sandia National Laboratories (SNL) currently achieves a bandwidth efficiency (η ) of 0.5 to 1.0 bps/Hz by using traditional modulation schemes, such as, BPSK and QFSK. SNL has an interest in increasing the present bandwidth efficiency by a factor of 4 or higher with the same allocated bandwidth (about 10 MHz). Simulations have shown that 32QAM trellis-coded modulation (TCM) gives a good bit error rate (BER) performance, and meets the requirements as far as the bandwidth efficiency is concerned. Critical to achieving this is that the receiver be able to achieve timing synchronization. This paper examines a particular timing recovery algorithm for all-digital receivers. Timing synchronization in a digital receiver can be achieved in different ways. One way of achieving this is by interpolating the original sampled sequence to produce another sampled sequence synchronized to the symbol rate or a multiple of the symbol rate. An adaptive sampling conversion algorithm which performs this function was developed by Floyd Gardner in 1993. In the present work, his algorithm was applied to two different modulation schemes, BPSK and 4-ary PAM. The two schemes were simulated in the presence of AWGN and ISI along with Gardner’s algorithm for timing recovery, and a fractionally spaced equalizer (T/2 FSE) for equalization. Simulations show that the algorithm gives good BER performance for BPSK in all the situations, and at different sampling frequencies, but unfortunately poor performance for the 4-ary PAM scheme. This indicates that Gardner’s algorithm for sampling conversion is not suitable for multi-level signaling schemes.