Sliding Trellis-Based Frame Synchronization

TL;DR

This paper introduces a low-delay, low-complexity Sliding Trellis-based Frame Synchronization method that improves efficiency and reduces latency in communication systems, especially over fading channels, with minimal performance loss.

Contribution

It presents a novel sliding trellis approach for frame synchronization that reduces complexity and delay while leveraging soft channel information and protocol redundancies.

Findings

Reduces frame synchronization latency and complexity.

Outperforms existing FS techniques in fading channels.

Maintains near-optimal performance with minimal degradation.

Abstract

Frame Synchronization (FS) is required in several communication standards in order to recover the individual frames that have been aggregated in a burst. This paper proposes a low-delay and reducedcomplexity Sliding Trellis (ST)-based FS technique, compared to our previously proposed trellis-based FS method. Each burst is divided into overlapping windows in which FS is performed. Useful information is propagated from one window to the next. The proposed method makes use of soft information provided by the channel, but also of all sources of redundancy present in the protocol stack. An illustration of our STbased approach for the WiMAX Media Access Control (MAC) layer is provided. When FS is performed on bursts transmitted over Rayleigh fading channel, the ST-based approach reduces the FS latency and complexity at the cost of a very small performance degradation compared to our full complexity trellis-based FS and outperforms state-of-the-art FS techniques.