An Improved Phase Deviation Discriminator for Carrier Synchronization of APSK Signal in Satellite-to-Ground Communication Systems

The conventional phase deviation discriminator used in the decision feedback loop for carrier synchronization of APSK signal requires symbol decision for every constellation symbol. When the number of constellation symbols used for coherent integration becomes larger, the complexity would increase greatly. To solve this problem, this work proposes an improved phase deviation discriminator based on symbol decisions. It firstly executes doubling frequency on the APSK signal to reduce the modulation order and eliminate the modulation phase of the received signal. Then, it rotates the constellation clockwise and selects the constellation symbols that on the X-axis to execute coherent integration and phase deviation extraction. Compared to the conventional discriminator in the decision feedback loop, the proposed discriminator can reduce the symbol decision times and steps. Therefore, when a large number of constellation symbols are used for coherent integration, it can reduce the computational complexity significantly. Moreover, with a large number of constellation symbols, the proposed discriminator achieves better BER and RMSE performance than other existing feedback loops.