Design Consideration and Performance of Networked Narrowband Waveforms for Tactical Communications

Abstract : An air-interface architecture to ensure reliable signal acquisition and synchronisation for a narrowband networking waveform is presented. Simulation results show that a relatively simple preamble design can be used to ensure sufficiently reliable estimates of the unknown physical layer synchronisation parameters i.e. phase, frequency offset and timing errors. Results are presented comparing the error variance of the synchronisation parameters with the lower bounds for an unbiased estimator. The results enable system designers to select the operating noise tolerances for a given radio and modify the preamble architecture accordingly.