Carrier Recovery and

symbol Synchronization in
signal Demodulation

Mukul Chauhan
National Institute of Technical Teachers’ Training
& Reasearch
Chandigarh
Why we go for Carrier recovery
and
synchronization???????????
 Carrier recovery

In a digital communication system, information can be sent

over a carrier through changes in its fundamental
characteristics.
These characteristics phase, frequency, and amplitude, are
modified by the transmitter and must be detected by the
receiver.
Thus, it is absolutely essential for a receiver to recover the
carrier.
Carrier recovery is required if the signal is detected
coherently.
 Carrier recovery(contn….)

Receiver is assumed to be able to generate a reference

carrier whose frequency and phase are identical to those of
the carriers at the transmitter.
When the exploits knowledge of carrier’s phase to detect
the signals, the process is called coherent detector.
Carrier signal is generated by the local oscillator.
LO at the receiver is generally not synchronous with that
of the transmitter.
To match the receiver carrier oscillator frequency and
phase to match that of the transmitter signal, carrier
recovery is done.
 Step for carrier recovery

Two steps are there

First step:-Carrier synchronization parameter
are estimated.
Carrier synchronization Parameters
-carrier frequency offset
-carrier phase offset

Second step:-receiving signal is corrected

according to the estimates made.
carrier frequency offset
Due to the frequency instability in oscillator
carrier phase offset
Due to the phase instability in oscillator
Assume that the frequency and phase of a carrier are fc
and φc ,and the frequency and phase of a LO at the
receiver are f0 and φ0.
Then after the received signal mixed with the LO,
CARRIER FREQUENCY OFFSET f= fc- f0

CARRIER PHASE OFFSET φ= φc- φ0

 Symbol synchronization
Required in every digital communication system which
transmits information synchronously.
Also known as timing recovery.
In an practical system ,not only an isolated signal but a
sequence of symbols has to be transmitted.
To perform demodulation ,the receiver has to know the start
and stop times of the individual signal.
The output of the demodulator must be sampled periodically at
the symbol rate.
So it can defined when to sample and when to reset the
correlators.
 Symbol synchronization(CONT..)

We can say the process of selecting instances is called

synchronization.
To perform this periodic sampling ,we required a clock
signal at the receiver.
Tx and Rx clocks are likely to have mismatch.
Clock recovery tries to synchronize the receiver clock with
the symbol-rate transmitter clock to obtain samples at
appropriate instances.
 Binary PSK Receiver

In Binary phase shift keying the transmitted

signal is a sinusoid of fixed amplitude.
In has one fixed phase when the data is at one
level and when the data is at other level the
phase is different by 180 degree.
A block diagram of a binary PSK signal
demodulator and detector shown in figure(1).
The carrier phase estimate is used in
generating the reference signal
for the correlator.
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Second level
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Figure 1(Binary PSK Receiver)

 M-ary psk receiver

Two correlators (matched filter) are required to correlate

the received signal with the two quadrature carrier signal

and ,where is the

carrier phase estimation.
o Detector is now a phase detector.
o Compares the received signal phases with the possible
transmitted signal phases.
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Second level
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Figure 2(M-ary psk receiver)

 M-ary pam Receiver

A single correlator is required.

Detector is an amplitude detector, which compares the received
signal amplitude with the possible transmitted signal amplitudes.
An AGC at the front end of the demodulator to eliminate channel
gain vibration. which would affect the amplitude detector.
AGC has a relatively long time constant, so that it does not
respond to the signal amplitudes vibrations that occur on a
symbol-by-symbol basis.
AGC maintains a fixed average (signal plus noise) power at its
output.
 es
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Second level
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Figure 3(M-ary pam Receiver)

 QAM RECEIVER

 Really Quadrature Phase Amplitude modulation.

AGC is required to maintain a constant average power
signal.
Similar to PSK receiver.
Detector computes the Euclidean distance between the
received noise-corrupted signal point and the M possible
transmitted points, and selects the signal closest to the
received point.
Signal of similar energy and highly cross correlated have a
small euclidean separation.
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Second level
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Figure 4(QAM RECEIVER)

Thank you