Trellis extracted synchronisation techniques applicable to automatic link establishment

With the ever increasing interest in automatic link establishment (ALE) and adaptive radio systems, there is much research being carried out to try and improve the performance of such systems. As well as looking at completely new systems, there is also interest in improving the performance of systems complying to the US MIL-STD 188-141A, as this is the currently established standard in this area. It has previously been shown how a new trellis structure for the (24,12) Golay code can be used to obtain the soft decision maximum likelihood of this code, which allows an improvement of a MIL-STD compliant system, without affecting its compliance. This paper addresses several techniques for making use of this trellis structure to allow maximum likelihood, or near maximum likelihood, block synchronisation within a MIL-STD compliant system.