Blind block timing estimation for Alamouti STBC: An adaptive cyclostationary-based approach

Block timing synchronization, which could be data-aided or non-data-aided, is a critical part of space-time block codes (STBCs) for recovery of transmitted symbols. The data-aided schemes are not suited for some problems like bandwidth efficiency and most of the existing non-data-aided techniques rely on the received signals statistics and channel coefficients estimation increasing their complexity. In this paper, a non-data-aided cyclostationary-based approach is proposed for block timing estimation in Alamouti STBC employing frequency-shifted versions of the received signals. The method is non-statistical with low complexity and requires no knowledge of channel coefficients. Simulation results confirm the effectiveness of the method.& COPY; 2022 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V. on behalf of The Korean Institute of Communications and Information Sciences. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/).