In this letter, a new rapid and accurate synchronization scheme based on PMF-FFT for high dynamic GPS receiver is proposed, with a fine Doppler frequency estimation inserted between the acquisition and tracking modules. Fine Doppler estimation is firstly achieved through a simple interpolation of the PMF-FFT outputs in terms of LSE criterion. Then a high dynamic tracking loop based on UKF is designed to verify the synchronization speed and accuracy. Numerical results show that the fine frequency estimation can closely approach the CRB, and the high dynamic receiver can obtain fine synchronization rapidly just through a very narrow bandwidth. The simplicity and low complexity give the proposed scheme a strong and practical-oriented ability, even for weak GPS signals.

In this letter, a new and accurate frequency estimation method of complex exponential signals is proposed. The proposed method divides the signal samples into several identical segments and sums up the samples belonging to the same segment respectively. Then it utilizes fast Fourier transform (FFT) algorithm with zero-padding to obtain a coarse estimation, and exploits three Fourier coefficients to interpolate a fine estimation based on least square error (LSE) criterion. Numerical results show that the proposed method can closely approach the Cramer-Rao bound (CRB) at low signal-to-noise ratios (SNRs) with different estimation ranges. Furthermore, the computational complexity of the proposed method is proportional to the estimation range, showing its practical-oriented ability. The proposed method can be useful in several applications involving carrier frequency offset (CFO) estimation for burst-mode satellite communications.

In this letter, we investigate the problem of feedforward timing estimation for burst-mode satellite communications. By analyzing the correlation property of frame header (FH) acquisition in the presence of sampling offset, a novel data-aided feedforward timing estimator that utilizes the correlation peaks for interpolating the fractional timing offset is proposed. Numerical results show that even under low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) and small rolloff factor conditions, the proposed estimator can approach the modified Cramer-Rao bound (MCRB) closely. Furthermore, this estimator only requires two samples per symbol and can be implemented with low complexity with respect to conventional data-aided estimators.