Cramer Rao bound analysis for data aided time synchronization of MSK over a fast fading channel

In this paper we consider a time synchronization problem for a minimum shift keying (MSK) signal received over a time-selective, fast fading channel. We calculate the Cramer Rao bound (CRB) for the case when the transmitted data bits are a-priori known and examine the effects of parameters such as signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) and temporal correlation of the channel on the synchronization performance. In addition, we derive an explicit high SNR approximation to the CRB. Lastly, we use the bound to study how the choice of transmitted bits (the training sequence) influences synchronization performance thus enabling us to identify the best and worst case bit sequences.