2015 8th International Congress on Image and Signal Processing (CISP 2015)
An Efficient Preamble Design for Burst Mode
Continuous Phase Modulation
Zhipeng Xi, Jiang Zhu, and Feng Wu
School of Electronic Science and Engineering
National University of Defense Technology, Hunan, Changsha, China, 410073
Email: xzp paper@163.com
Abstract—In this paper, an efficient preamble designed for
the burst mode continuous phase modulation (CPM) signals is
proposed. The innovative preamble is based on the combination of
a single tone signal and a unique CPM signal. Like the preamble
adopted in MIL-188-181B standard, the proposed preamble can
estimate the carrier frequency and phase offset, and acquire the
symbol timing and frame synchronization. The performance of
the designed preamble is assessed by computer simulation. The
experimental results is that their carrier frequency, phase and
symbol timing gaps with their own Modified Cramer-Rao Bound
(MCRB) are very small. The proposed preamble is a good choice
for timing acquisition.
Keywords—Burst Mode, Continuous Phase Modulation, Pream-
ble, Synchronization.
I. I NTRODUCTION
Many wireless communications transmit information ac-
cording to the format of packets, people usually inserts a
fixed symbol sequence to each packet to achieve the aim of
accurate, fast synchronization. This data sequence is referred
to as a preamble or training sequence and is known a prior to
the receiver. In general, the computational complexity could
be reduced by using a preamble and The reliability of the
synchronization can be improved at the price of a little
reduction in transmission efficiency.
The performance of any data-aided (DA) estimator can be
rely on the preamble to be used. Therefore, it is a design
challenge to choose the best preamble for a given length. Lots
of efforts have been devoted to preamble design for linear
modulation. The authors in [1] gave closed-form expressions of
the CRB of the linear modulation, which is a function related
to the symbol sequences. In [2], the author design the optimum
preamble for linearly modulated signals using the Cramer-Rao
Bound (CRB) method. In [3], the optimal preamble for the
burst offset QPSK (OQPSK) is derived via CRB analysis.
Continuous phase modulation (CPM) has been widely used
due to their excellent power, bandwidth efficiency and its
constant envelope property [4]. However, for universal CPM
signals, as far as we know, there is no systemic analysis for the
design of optimal preamble. For example, Mehlan have studied
preamble design in burst mode minimum shift keying (MSK)
modulation, which is a very special type of CPM signal.
The use of alternating sequences 1100...1100 as a preamble
has proven to be reliable in MIL-188-181B standard [5]. The
preamble can be better recognized when corrupted by spurious
harmonics that result from interference and non-linearity of the
receiver circuitry. In spite of this, one subtle weakness is that
978-1-4673-9098-9/15/$31.00 ©2015 IEEE
the preamble can not be capable of supporting highest data
rate CPM due to the higher frequency tones of the repetitive
sequence will go against the restriction of spectral mask.
On the other hand, in current and coming standards, there is
a tremendous requirement for searching the best preamble to be
used. For instance, the integrated network enhanced telemetry
(iNET) standard [6], which is currently being developed for
telemetry applications. The iNET standard takes advantage of
CPM signals to transmit burst data packets, which indeed need
fast and accurate synchronization based on a preamble.
The letter is organized as follows. In section II, we first
introduce the preamble model and make a concise comparison
of the proposed burst mode preamble with the MIL-188-181B
standard is made. In Sec III, the carrier frequency, phase
offset estimation question for the continuous wave (CW) part
is first analyzed. We then examined the symbol timing and
frame synchronization for the SOM component. In the end, the
optimum lengths allocation of the CW and start of message
(SOM) are also discussed. Finally, we made a comparison
of the proposed burst mode preamble with MIL-188-181B
standard preamble in Sec IV. Finally, some conclusions are
drawn in Sec V.
II. P REAMBLE M ODEL
The proposed preamble is made up of two parts as shown in
upper of Fig.1. The frequency offset, phase offset are derived
from the CW component of the preamble, while the symbol
timing and frame synchronization are achieved by the SOM
part of the preamble.
In contrast, the preamble in MIL-188-181B is different in
either format or processing approach. In the MIL-188-181B
standard, the carrier frequency, phase offset, and the error
of symbol timing are all obtained by adopting a repeating
”1.1.0.0” MSK signal. The preamble can produces a direct
current component at the zero frequency, besides two tones
at 1/4 the symbol rate are also generated. The direct current
component has the largest amplitude, Thus, it is the most
effective tone to estimate the carrier frequency, phase offset.
The phase of either the upper tone or the lower tone after offset
compensation can be employed for estimation the symbol
timing error. This is just the weakness of the preamble, because
the presence of the higher order tones necessitates a back-off
in symbol rate to avoid adjacent channel interference. At last,
by using the cross-correlation of the demodulated bit data, the
frame synchronization could be obtained.
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 3URSRVHG3UHDPEOH
 2 
&: 620 +HDGHU 'DWD E φ(t) − φ̂(t) ≥ CRBφ(t) ≈
  2

)UHTXFHQ\RIIVHW 6\PEROWLPLQJ 1 t − Lcw Ts /2

3KDVHRIIVHW )UDPHV\QFK Es
1 + 12
2N 0
Lcw Lcw Ts
3UHDPEOHDGRSWHGLQ0,/% (4)
5HSHDWLQJ
VHTXHQFH 620 +HDGHU 'DWD where fˆc is the frequency offset estimation. φ̂(t) is phase offset
estimation. We make an approximation by using N − 1 ≈ N ,
)UHTXFHQ\RIIVHW )UDPHV\QFK N 2 − 1  N 2 to get the (3) and (4), which are quite precise
3KDVHRIIVHW for big values of N .
6\PEROWLPLQJ
The low bound of the phase estimate is rely on the position
of the received signal. It could attain a minimum value when
Fig. 1. Format and synchronization strategy of the two preambles
the received signal locate at the center with t = Lcw T /2. In
this case, the CRB can be expressed as
III. P ERFORMANCE OF PROPOSED PREAMBLE 1
CRBφ(Lcw T /2) ≈ Es
(5)
2N 0
Lcw
In this section, The performance of the proposed preamble
is analyzed in two groups according to the functional diagram This result is just the MCRB of the phase offset estimate.
in Fig.1. The frequency and phase offset results are decided When t = Lcw T , the estimate is 4 times of the minimum
by the CW part of the preamble. After that, the SOM part value and could be written as
of the preamble can achieve the symbol timing and frame 2
synchronization. Besides, the optimal length of CW and SOM CRBφ(0) = CRBφ(Lcw T ) ≈ Es (6)
is also considered. N0 Lcw

Essentially, it is a non-linear estimation for frequency, a

threshold effect exists when the SNR is adequately lower.
A. Performance of the CW component That is to say, the estimate errors could be several times
larger than the so-called performance benchmark when the
For an additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) channel,
SNR below a specially threshold. The algorithm which can
the received complex baseband signal is a CW signal with
efficiently estimate the frequency offset when the SNR at the
sinusoidal feature. It can be expressed as
lower range has been raised in [8]. The algorithm could be
summarized as follows.
rcw (kTs ) = ej(2πfc kTs +φo ) + ω(kTs ), k = 0, 1, . . . (N − 1)
(1) Algorithm 1 Iterative algorithm of frequency estimation
where fc and φo are the unknown carrier frequency and phase Let: NF F T = γN , γ > 1
offsets, 1/Ts is the over-sampling factor, ω(kTs ) are indepen- Calculate: S = F F T (rcw (t) , NF F T )
dent identically distributed Gaussian noise with normalized 2
Y (n) = |S (n)|
variance σω 2 . At any time t = kTs , the phase of the CW
Find: m = arg max {Y (n)}
component can be given by n
Set: Δ = 1,
φ(t) = 2πfc t + φo (2) Y−1 = Y (m − 1), Y0 = Y (m) and Y1 = Y (m + 1)
For Q iterations do:
Δ = Δ/2

For ease of analysis, the SN R = 1 σω 2 can be substituted If Y−1 > Y1 then
by P signal /Pnoise = (Es /T )/(N0 Fs ) = (1/Fs ) × Es /N0 , Y−1 = Y0 , m = m + Δ
where Fs = T /Ts is the over-sampling ratio. The entire length else
of CW part Lcw could be expressed in terms of the SOM Y1 = Y 0 , m = m − Δ
sampling interval Ts . Then the entire samples can be expressed Endif 2
N
−1
−j2π N km 
as N = Lcw Fs . Y0 =  s (k)e F F T

k=0
According to [7], in the AWGN channel, the CRB of the Finally:fˆ = m
NF F T fs
frequency offset and phase offset estimation of a complex
sinusoid signal can be serve as lower bounds. The unbiased
variance of estimation can be expressed as The algorithm is first involves an execution of NF F T -
point fast Fourier transform (FFT). After that, the peak of the
spectrum could be searched by using an iterative improvement
 2  algorithm. The iterative improvement algorithm first find the
1 3
E fc − fˆc ≥ CRBf ≈ 2 2 Es 3
(3) frequencies close to the current pseudo-peak. After a adequate
Ts 2π N0 Lcw times of iterations, the gap of the estimation can be identical

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 1
10
where Es is the energy of each information symbol, Ts is the
CRBf symbol period, and Φ(t, α) represents the phase function
0 Iterative Algorithm L−1

10
Φ(t) = j2πh αi q(t − nT ) (8)
i=0

where h = pr is the modulation index, the data symbols

-1
10
RMS (Hz)

{αi } are assumed independent identically distributed and αi ∈

-2
10 {±1}. The q(t) is phase smoothing function and its differential
quotient is the frequency pulse g(t), whose sustained time is
LTs .
-3
10
In an AWGN channel, the complex envelope of the received
signal can be written as
-4
10
-10 -5 0 5 10 15 2Es j(2πef (t)+eφ (Lcw Ts )) jΦ(kTs −τ,α)
Es /N0 (dB) rsom (kTs ) = e e +ω(kTs )
Ts
(9)
Fig. 2. The Frequency offset estimation of the propose algorithm along with where ef is the residual frequency offset and eφ is the
CRBf , Lcw = 30 and iteration times is 12 residual phase offset, τ is the symbol delay. For binary, single
modulation index h CPM signal with rectangular (REC), raised
0
cosine (RC) frequency pulses, the MCRB of symbol timing can
10
be derived from [9]
  LTs 2 1
2
E (τ − τ̂ ) ≥ M CRBτ ≈ 2 2 E
(10)
Bh 2π Ns Lsom
0
RMS error (rads)

where B is constant that dependent on the shape of the pulse.

-1
When the pulse is REC the constant is 1, for RC pulse, it equal
10
to 3/2. Lsom denotes the length of the SOM.

CRB (t=Lcw T/2)

The contrast of reachable symbol timing error between
φ CPM signal with different parameters should therefore under
CRB (t=0)
φ a bandwidth constraint. The valid occupied bandwidth (OCB)
Iterative Algorith (t=Lcw T/2) of a binary CPM signal could be expressed as
Iterative Algorithm (t=0) 
-2
10 4h2 LT 2
-10 -5 0 5 10 15 BOCB = g(t) dt (11)
Es /N0(dB) T 0

It can be easily calculated BOCB = Bh2 LTs2 , which is just
Fig. 3. The Phase offset estimation of the propose algorithm along with the reciprocal of the first part of the M CRBτ . The implication
CRBφ , Lcw = 30 and iteration times is 12
is that, if we ignore the parameters of different CPM schemes,
there is no theoretical advantage is indicated by the MCRB in
symbol timing error.
with the CRB in any frequency range. The estimation of the
φ̂o can be obtained by using the same method. Once fˆo , φ̂o are If we obtained the discrete samples of the known SOM
available, the phase estimation at any time could be acquired signal, either symbol timing estimate or frame synchronization
according to (2). could be both achieved. We can use the cross-correlation
function to find the correlation peak. When the SNR is large
Based on the simulations, both the frequency offset and enough, the RAW cross-correlation samples could correctly
phase offset estimate root mean square (RMS) error can capture the sample nearest the truth-peak, implying the accu-
match its CRB, as illustrated in Fig.2, Fig.3. Because it is racy of symbol timing is restricted by the over-sampling ratio.
a representative non-linear estimator, the performance at low To avoid the error floor, we employ an iterative peak search
SNR is abated by the threshold effect, leading to a fast depart algorithm similar to frequency estimation earlier mentioned in
from the CRB. the context. We did not interpolate the received SOM signal
at every iteration, the referenced SOM signal can be revived
by using the results of previous iteration. Besides the amazing
performance, there exists another advantage of this method
B. Performance of the SOM component
is huge reduction of implementation complexity. The optimal
1) Symbol timing estimation: The complex baseband rep- performance can be obtained at moderate over-sampling factor
resentation of a binary CPM could be expressed as (Fs = 4 is enough).
The symbol timing performance is shown in Fig.4. In our
2Es simulation, two binary CPM schemes have been chosen. One
s(t) = exp (jΦ(t, α)) (7) of them is the MSK modulation with h = 1/2 and L = 1,
Ts

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 0 -1
10 10

Es /N0=-2dB
Es /N0=-2dB

h=1/4, L=3 Es /N0=-6dB

Symbol timing error variance

-1 -2 Es /N0=-10dB
10 10

s
RMS (T )

h=1/2, L=1

-2 -3
10 10

MCRB
τ
RAW
Iterative Algroithm
-3 -4
10 10
-10 -5 0 5 10 15 20 25 0 0.1 0.2 0.3 0.4 0.5 0.6 0.7 0.8 0.9 1
Eb/N0 (dB) Lcw /(Lcw +Lsom)

Fig. 4. The performance of symbol timing , Lsom = 70, Fs = 8 and Fig. 5. Timing error variance under different CW length ratio, Es /N0
iteration times is 15

the other with h = 1/4 and L = 3. In general, it can be
concluded that less spectrally efficient CPM could offer better
performance that more closer to the MCRB. The MCRB of the
MSK indicates the error of standard deviation is about 0.05
when Es /N0 = 0.5 dB, and the performance of the proposed
iterative algorithm is not exceeding 0.3 dB of this mark. The
MCRB of another CPM need Es /N0 = 11.7 dB for the similar
accuracy and the proposed algorithm is approximately 1.4 dB
worse.
2) Frame synchronization: In general, the receiver can
achieve frame synchronization by positioning the special SOM
data sequence inside the total symbol sequence. Here, we use
a very simple correlation peak search algorithm. Considering
the correlation of the complex signal
 τ +Lsom Ts
1
Rr̃y (τ ) = r̃(t).y ∗ (t − τ )dt
Lsom Ts τ
 Lsom Ts
1
= ej(2πef (t+τ )+eφ (Lcw Ts )) y ∗ (t)dt
Lsom Ts 0
(12)
where y(t) is known signal of SOM with Lsom symbols
and r̃(t) = ej(2πef (t)+eφ (Lcw Ts )) y(t) is the SOM signal after
frequency offset compensation and phase offset compensation.
2
For CPM schemes, we have |y(t)| = 1. when τ = 0, the
cross-correlation in (12) becomes
1 ej2πef Lsom Ts − 1
Rr̃y (0) = ejeφ (Lcw Ts )
Lsom Ts j2πef
j(2πef Lsom Ts +eφ (Lcw T )
=e ) sin c(πef Lsom Ts ) (13)
where sin c(x) = sinx/x. Both |Rr̃y (0)| = the frame synchronization approach adopting in the MIL-
|sin c(πef Lsom T )| and Re (Rr̃y (0)) = cos(πef Lsom Ts +
eφ (Lcw T )) sin c(πef Lsom T ) could measure the correlation
magnitude. We take the |Rr̃y (0)| for measuring the correlation
magnitude, because |Rr̃y (0)| is more robust than Re (Rr̃y (0))
when exists residual frequency offset and phase offset.
C. Optimization allocation lengths of the CW part and SOM
component
After the type of SOM modulation scheme is confirmed,
the Lsom can be obtained based on the desired level of symbol
timing accuracy. The length of Lsom at the desired minimum
Es /N0 can be solved by rearranging (10). After that, as dis-
cussed earlier, Lcw could be chosen adequate long to avoid any
significant deterioration. To acquire the optimum allocation of
Lcw and Lsom , we simulate the performance of the symbol
timing error under different relative length of the CW part
Lcw /(Lcw + Lsom ). Fig.5 shows the simulation results with
different relative length ratio, where a fixed preamble length
Lcw + Lsom = 100 is used. We can obtain that the optimal
length ratio is between 0.3 and 0.4. Too small ratio means a
enormous degradation of the cross-correlation peak. In such
a case, both frame synchronization and symbol timing could
be lost. Too big ratio will directly degrade the performance of
symbol timing. In addition, the optimal ratio is actually quite
insensitive to Es /N0 , varying only from 0.4 down to 0.3 as
Es /N0 increases by 12 dB.
IV. C OMPARISON WITH MIL-188-181B S TANDARD
In MIL-188-181B, the relevant parameters could be esti-
mated from the same preamble segment. The better perfor-
mance can be achieved by interchanging SNR with signal
duration. For the proposed preamble, It is shown that the
CRBf is an inverse cube dependence on signal sustained
time Lcw and inverse linear relationship with the SNR. For
the CRBφ(t) , it is an inverse linear dependence on signal
sustained time Lcw . It can be observed that the concatenated
nature of CW part and SOM component can maximizes SNR
at the cost of a shorter sustained time for each of them.
The relative lengths of the CW part and SOM component
could be handled to obtain the optimal solution. Moreover,
188-181B depends on acquiring the demodulated bits ahead.
While for the proposed preamble, the receiver can begin
demodulation if frame synchronization is achieved and symbol
timing estimation error is small enough. Finally, the higher
frequency tones of the repeating ”1.0.1.0” sequence would go
against spectral mask restrictions when baud rate is higher
enough, which make the MIL-188-181B standard preamble
could not support the most bandwidth efficient CPM patterns.
There are various types detection strategy for the pro-
posed preamble, a precise comparison of the two preambles

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 0
10
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
This work is supported by National Natural Science Foun-
dation of China (No.61201166) and Equipment Develop-
ment Foundation (No.9140A25030113KG01359). The authors
-1
10 would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their con-
structive comments.
s
RMS (T )

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τ Jan. 2003.
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181B preamble New York: Plenum, 1986.
[5] M. Miller, M. Harris, and D.Stephens, “An innovative synchronization
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The performance of symbol timing for the two preambles is
shown in Fig.6. The length of MIL-188-181B preamble is 100
symbol periods. For the proposed preamble, the CW length is
36 symbols and the SOM component is an MSK modulation
with 64 bit random bits. The symbol timing lower bound for
100 symbols is also shown in Fig.6. It can be observed that
the proposed preamble exhibit approximately 3dB worse than
the bound. There are two MIL-188-181B curves shown in the
figure, they are distinguished by whether one or both of the
basic harmonics are used to estimate the timing error. Using
both two tones can average the timing estimates, which brings
an approximate 5dB gain. It can be demonstrated that the
proposed preamble and MIL-188-181B preamble handled by
two basic harmonics are almost identical.

V. C ONCLUSIONS

In this paper, an efficient preamble designed for the burst

CPM signals is proposed. The new preamble is based on
the combination of a single tone signal and a unique CPM
signal. Simulation results for frequency offset, phase offset and
symbol timing error are shown very close to their respective
CRBs. We also optimized the duration of CW part and SOM
component, and it has been shown that the CW length should
be approximately 31% of the total preamble sustained time.
Finally, it can be demonstrate that the two preambles can
provided similar performance, making the proposed preamble
an attractive choice for timing acquisition.

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