Staggered Time and Frequency Search to Aid Frame Synchronization

This paper tackles the problem of frame synchronization in the presence of timing and frequency uncertainty. Considering a discretization of the timing uncertainty domain in time slots, and of the frequency uncertainty domain in frequency bins, this novel technique, called staggered time and frequency search, exploits a joint controlled single dwell Threshold Crossing criterion in both domains. In fact, differently from the conventional techniques, this method does not require any parallelism, but digitally controlling the sampler and the oscillator is in charge to scan different hypotheses in time and frequency until the acquisition is completed. According to the analytical and simulated results shown in this paper, this novel technique can obtain performance that is close to the one that can be achieved with the classical techniques, with complexity and power consumption reduction.