IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON COMMUNICATIONS, VOL. 50, NO.
5, MAY 2002
Doppler-Rate Estimation for Burst Digital Transmission
Michele Morelli
Abstract—We propose a new algorithm for Doppler rate estima-
tion in burst-mode phase shift keying (PSK) transmissions. This
issue may arise in mobile radio links when the received signal ex-
periences significant time-varying Doppler distortion, as in low-
earth-orbit satellite systems. The algorithm is based on the trans-
mission of a training sequence and has a feedforward structure that
is easy to implement in digital form. Its estimation accuracy is close
to the Cramer–Rao bound even at SNR values as low as 0 dB. Com-
parisons with earlier methods are discussed.
Index Terms—Burst-mode transmission, Doppler rate, Doppler
shift.
I. INTRODUCTION
B URST transmission of digital data is employed in sev-
eral applications such as satellite time-division multiple-
access (TDMA) systems and terrestrial mobile cellular radio. In
many cases, a preamble of known symbols is appended to each
burst for carrier and clock recovery. Data-aided (DA) algorithms
are normally employed to attain good performance with short
preambles.
In mobile radio transmission systems, the received signal may
experience significant time-varying Doppler distortion due to
the relative motion between transmitter and receiver. This oc-
curs, for instance, in communication systems based on a con-
stellation of nongeostationary low-earth-orbit (LEO) satellites
[1] and in millimeter-wave mobile communications for traffic
control and assistance [2]. In these situations, Doppler shift and
Doppler rate estimation must be performed at the receiver for
correct demodulation of the received signal. Also, Doppler in-
formation can be used to compute the relevant parameters as-
sociated with the satellite orbit [1] and is important in spec-
tral analysis of targets motion and synthetic aperture radar pro-
cessing [3].
The problem of estimating the Doppler shift is well covered
in the technical literature and several efficient algorithms al-
ready exist (see [4] and references therein). On the other hand,
Doppler rate recovery has received much less attention and only
a few schemes have been proposed so far [5]–[9]. Some existing
techniques are based on the the maximum-likelihood (ML) prin-
ciple [5]. The ML estimator, however, involves the optimization
of a multivariable cost function and requires a large amount of
computations. As the ML estimator is not practically useful in
most situations, suboptimal schemes must be resorted to. These
include the least-squares technique by Baggenstoss and Kay
[6], the discrete polynomial phase transform method [7], and
Paper approved by L. Vandendorpe, the Editor for Transmission Systems of
the IEEE Communications Society. Manuscript received June 14, 2000; revised
April 15, 2001, and July 15, 2001.
The author is with the Department of Information Engineering, University of
Pisa, 56100 Pisa, Italy (e-mail: m.morelli@iet.unipi.it).
Publisher Item Identifier S 0090-6778(02)05117-6.
0900-6778/02$17.00 © 2002 IEEE
707
the iterative procedure developed in [8] for joint estimation of
phase, frequency and frequency-rate of an unmodulated carrier.
All these schemes achieve the Cramer–Rao lower bound at high
SNR values, however, their estimates are plagued by large er-
rors (outliers) at SNRs lower than 10–15 dB. This makes the al-
gorithms unsuitable for many coded transmission systems. The
scheme proposed in [9] performs suboptimum ML-based esti-
mation of the Doppler rate. It gives good estimates provided that
the Doppler shift is sufficiently small. Unfortunately, its perfor-
mance is unsatisfactory even at Doppler shifts as low as 1% of
the symbol rate.
In this paper, we propose a new DA Doppler rate estima-
tion method that has some advantages over previous schemes. It
can handle Doppler shifts greater than the method in [9] and its
threshold, i.e., the SNR at which outliers start to occur, is much
lower than in [5]–[8].
II. SIGNAL MODEL
We assume -ary PSK modulation and additive white
Gaussian noise (AWGN). Filtering is evenly split between
transmitter and receiver and the overall channel response is
Nyquist. Timing is ideal but the received signal is affected by
time-varying Doppler distortion. The maximum instantaneous
Doppler shift is much smaller than the symbol rate .
Filtering the received waveform in a matched filter and sam-
pling at proper times yields
(1)
where is the observation length and is the
center of the observation window. Also, are unit- ampli-
tude PSK symbols belonging to a known training sequence,
and represent the phase and the Doppler shift (normalized to
), while is the Doppler rate (normalized to ). The
noise samples are complex-valued independent and
identically distributed Gaussian random variables with zero
mean and variance . From (1), it is seen that
depends on . However, since , the dependence
can be removed by multiplying by . In doing this, we
implicitly assume that the transmitted symbols are known, i.e.,
they belong to a training sequence. Letting ,
from (1) we have
(2)
where is statistically equivalent to . Thus,
may be viewed as samples of an unmodulated carrier
affected by Doppler distortion and embedded in white Gaussian
noise.
708 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON COMMUNICATIONS, VOL. 50, NO. 5, MAY 2002

In the sequel, the parameters , , and are assumed to be general formula , it can be shown
deterministic but unknown constants. Our goal is to estimate that
based on the observation of the samples . The phase
and the frequency are viewed as nuisance parameters.
In [6], it is shown that the Cramer–Rao bound (CRB) to the (10)
error variance of any unbiased estimator of the Doppler rate provided that and the are sufficiently small.
is given by Clearly, (10) relates to in a linear fashion and the
problem is to estimate a constant, , from the noisy mea-
(3) surements .
Letting , the ML estimator
Note that for large decays as while the CRB of is given by [11]
for Doppler shift decreases as [4].
(11)
III. ESTIMATION ALGORITHM
where is a -dimensional vector of all ones and
We begin by dividing the observed vector is the covariance matrix of . From (10), the
[the superscript indi- -entry of is found to be
cates vector transpose] into adjacent segments, each containing
samples. The samples within each segment are then summed
together to produce quantities
(12)
(4)
otherwise

Substituting (2) into (4) yields so that (11) becomes

(13)
(5)
with
where (14)

The corresponding estimation variance is given by [11]

(6) (15)
are independent zero-mean Gaussian random variables with
variance . To proceed, assume that and are which, using (12), reduces to
sufficiently small so that the approximation [10]
(16)

(7) Comparing the above result with (3), we see that for the
variance of attains the CRB.
can be made in (5). Correspondingly, we have The computational complexity of the proposed estimator can
be assessed as follows. Assume that the coefficients
have been precomputed and stored. Then, computing
(8) from requires real additions. Also, the right-hand
side (RHS) of (13) needs multiplications and ad-
Hence, denoting by the argument of and assuming
ditions. Thus, the total number of operations is .
high SNRs, from (8) we get
IV. SIMULATION RESULTS

(9) Computer simulations have been run to analyze the perfor-

mance of the proposed estimator in terms of bias and mean
where is the imaginary part of and is the value square estimation error (MSEE). Fig. 1 illustrates the average
of reduced to the interval . An estimate of is now ob- estimates, , for and . The observa-
tained from the sequence by paralleling Kay’s approach tion length is and the SNR is set to 15 dB. The ideal
in [11] for the estimation of the Doppler shift. The idea is to re- line is also indicated as a reference. It is seen that
late to the twice-differenced phases the estimation interval depends on . For , the estimates
rather than to itself. In fact, exploiting the are unbiased over the range while with the
IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON COMMUNICATIONS, VOL. 50, NO. 5, MAY 2002 709

Fig. 1. Average estimates as obtained with the proposed algorithm.

Fig. 3. Sensitivity of the proposed algorithm to Doppler shifts.

CRB is also reported as a benchmark. We see that the MSEE

keeps close to the CRB at intermediate/high SNR values. As
SNR decreases, however, a rapid increase in the MSEE is ob-
served. The abscissa at which the slope of the curve starts to
change indicates the estimator threshold and is a manifestation
of the occurrence of outliers. The results in Fig. 2 indicates that
the threshold is reduced by 3–4 dB when is doubled. With
, the threshold is as low as 0 dB, allowing the estimator
to be used with coded transmission systems.
The sensitivity of the proposed estimator to Doppler shifts is
shown in Fig. 3. It is seen that the performance deteriorates as
increases. With , the MSEE is 3 dB away from the
CRB and the threshold is approximately 3 dB higher than with
.
Comparisons have been made with the estimator proposed
by Giannetti, Luise, and Reggiannini (GLR) in [9] as shown in
(17), at the bottom of the page, where . Fig. 4
illustrates the MSEE of the GLR estimator for some values of
Fig. 2. MSEE of the proposed algorithm.
the Doppler shift. The observation length is (the GLR
algorithm is derived assuming an observation window with an
estimation interval is limited to . Similar results are odd number of samples) and . As we can see, the curve
obtained with . corresponding to keeps close to the CRB. However, the
Fig. 2 shows the MSEE of the proposed estimator versus SNR performance rapidly degrades as increases and the threshold
as obtained with and . The observation is approximately 25 dB with Doppler shifts as low as 1% of the
length is still and the Doppler rate is . The symbol rate.

(17)
710 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON COMMUNICATIONS, VOL. 50, NO. 5, MAY 2002

V. CONCLUSION
We have proposed a new algorithm for Doppler rate estima-
tion in burst-mode transmissions. The algorithm is based on the
transmission of a training sequence and is suitable for PSK sig-
naling. Its accuracy attains the CRB at intermediate/high SNR
values. The estimation range is large and the threshold can be
reduced by increasing a parameter . Compared with other ex-
isting methods, the algorithm is simpler to implement and more
robust against Doppler shifts.

Fig. 4. MSEE of the GLR estimator.
Note that the RHS of (17) requires
(real additions plus multiplications). Thus, the computational
complexity is with the GLR scheme while it is
with the proposed estimator.
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