Abstract. Carrier synchronization is a crucial part of any wireless receiver, which is
required due to frequency and phase offset. In case of transmission in a Time
Division Multiple Access system the carrier synchronization has to be carried
out for every burst separately. The DVB-RCS2 standard specifies a large
variety of reference burst types with very limited known symbols. For each of
these types a thorough exploration of different synchronization algorithms is
required to find a trade-off between a good communication performance at very
low Signal to Noise Ratio (SNR) and an efficient hardware implementation. A state-of-the-art algorithm for carrier synchronization is based on the so
called Fast Fourier Transformation (FFT). An inherit limitation for the
precision of frequency estimation is given by the FFT point size. To
counteract this limitation, the FFT point size must be increased. In this
paper we extensively compare two possible interpolation techniques for FFT
results in three FFT-based carrier synchronization methods. These are applied
to various reference burst types specified in the DVB-RCS2 standard. The
trade-offs of these combinations are identified with a special focus on
hardware implementation efficiency. Furthermore, we present a flexible IP
core which can process the three synchronization methods in an efficient way
and analyze its implementation complexity and throughput on a Xilinx Kintex
FPGA.