Methods of, and apparatus for, synchronizing a receiver with a received signal

摘要

The invention provides a receiver that is capable of deducing the timing of a received signal having a frame structure and corresponding methods. Each frame contains a synchronization word. The receiver correlates the known synchronization word against the received signal to determine the position of the synchronization word. The correlation results can be accumulated over several frames' worth of the signal in order to enhance the determination. The frame boundaries within the signal can be translated and the process of determining the synchronization word position can then be repeated. In this manner, several results for the synchronization word position can be obtained and the best selected. A thresholding process can be used to curtail the number of frames' worth of the received signal that needs to be processed and a mechanism is provided to prevent the thresholding process from biasing the determination of the synchronization word position.