| Synchronization is a very important part of every digital communication receiver. While in bandpass coherent transmission, frequency and phase synchronization play a very important role in reliable transmission, symbol timing recovery is a necessary part of every baseband and bandpass coherent receiver. This dissertation deals with the problem of synchronization in the presence of fading and interference.In the second part, the problem of symbol timing recovery is investigated in systems that are subject to intersymbol interference and non-data-aided maximum likelihood synchronizer is derived in these channels. Then, a new simple bound on the performance of synchronizers is derived and compared to the previously known lower bounds. It is shown that while this lower bound solves the shortcomings of the well known modified Cramer-Rao bound at small values of signal-to-noise-ratio, it is much easier to compute compared to another well known bound, the detection theory bound.First, the performance of an automatic frequency control loop is investigated using two parameters of average switching rate and mean time to loss of lock. These parameters are derived in closed-form or as integral-form formulas for different scenarios of modulated and unmodulated signals in different fading channels when there is one interference signal present at the input of the AFC. Then, the results are generalized to the noisy fading scenario and it is shown that in Rayleigh fading case, the performance of AFC becomes better when the desired signal is noisier. |
