Frequency estimation in the presence of Doppler spread: Performance analysis

In this paper, we are concerned with the estimation of the frequency of a complex sinusoid that has been corrupted by complex-valued multiplicative and additive noises. This problem is important in many applications including array processing in the case of spatially distributed sources and synchronization in the context of time-selective channels. The multiplicative noise smears the spectral line due to the sinusoid. This smearing, which is often called Doppler spreading, may significantly degrade the estimation accuracy. The goal of this paper is to analytically assess this degradation. The finite-sample Cramer-Rao bounds (CRBs) are derived, and closed-form expressions are given for the large-sample CRB. The latter gives insights into the effective coherent and noncoherent SNRs for frequency estimation. We then analyze the accuracy of frequency estimators that are based on the angles of the sample covariances, Simulations results are presented to illustrate the theoretical results.