Patent ID: 7940861

Claim:
A method of reducing cycle slips in a carrier recovery loop for a phase detector, the method comprising: receiving an input signal including a plurality of samples, each received sample having an in-phase (I) and quadrature-phase (Q) component; providing the received input signal to a phase error estimator configured to determine a phase error estimate; providing the determined phase error estimate to a loop filter, and forming an output signal from the carrier recovery loop by subtracting an output of the loop filter from the received input signal, the method further including: determining the phase error estimate based on a combination of an amplitude and a phase of the received samples and a probability measure for a specifically transmitted symbol, the phase error estimate improving phase tracking performance of the carrier recovery loop, determining the phase error estimate based on a reliability of the sample, and determining the phase error estimate (E ij 0 ) according to: E ij 0 =( P ij •Φ ij )· A ij wherein P ij represents the vector of probabilities of transmission of a specific sample in relation to each constellation point for the phase detector, Φ ij represents the vector of hard phase error estimates, and A ij represents the amplitude for the received sample.