On the Timing Synchronization under 1-Bit Quantization and Oversampling

Abstract

As the demand for communication systems with high data rates is increasing, large bandwidths, and thus high sampling rates, are required. As a consequence, the energy consumption of conventional high resolution analog-to-digital converters increases drastically. On the contrary, high resolution in time domain is less difficult to achieve than high resolution in amplitude domain. This motivates the design of communication systems with 1-bit quantization and oversampling. It has been shown that utilizing run-length limited sequences and faster-than-Nyquist signaling is beneficial in terms of achievable rate. However, it is an open question how receiver synchronization can be performed in such systems. In this work we assume perfect frame, frequency and phase synchronization and investigate the effect of a fixed but unknown time shift. Due to 1-bit quantization, standard timing estimation and interpolation cannot be applied. We show that oversampling w.r.t. the signaling rate compensates for the error introduced by the time shift. If the oversampling factor is an integer value, estimating the time shift becomes obsolete if the oversampling rate is sufficiently high.