The recent advancements in wireless communications have made possible not only the definition, but also the implementation of entirely new applications with diverse requirements regarding data rate, coverage, latency and power consumption. Thus, the infrastructure behind these new and upcoming applications has to provide the flexibility necessary to configure each part of a communication system appropriately and fulfill the specific requirements. This thesis focuses on the investigation of two crucial tasks that have to be performed at the receiver of a communication system, namely frame detection and synchronization. Matched filtering with the assistance of linear frequency modulated (LFM) signals constitutes a low latency and high-performance technique for frame detection. Furthermore, in combination with their complex conjugate versions, LFM signals facilitate the estimation of the synchronization parameters by decoupling the time and frequency offsets. However, even though LFM signals are significantly robust against frequency offsets when subjected to matched filtering, the digitalization conducted at the receiver can lead to a strong degradation for certain conditions of time and frequency offsets. Currently, most of existing solutions to this problem resort to oversampling as well as interpolation techniques that are associated with an inevitable increase in complexity. One of the major goals of this work is to identify and solve the main challenges that degrade the detection performance and the estimation of the synchronization parameters when using matched filtering together with discrete versions of LFM signals. The analysis conducted in this dissertation indicates that the sources of degradation can be efficiently tackled with a suitable extension of the transmitted reference signal and a detector consisting of two matched filters. It is shown that, without employing computationally expensive procedures, the proposed solution offers a detection performance similar to the ideal one achievable in the absence of offsets. The structure and properties of the reference signals have been properly taken into consideration for the development of new synchronization algorithms. It is found that reversing the traditional order of estimation and compensation of the components of the carrier frequency offset can lead to a low complexity and ambiguity-free estimation approach. Moreover, the effectiveness of methods based on reversed autocorrelation metrics in resolving estimation ambiguities has been successfully demonstrated. In conclusion, the results gained during this dissertation prove the validity of the proposed approaches in dealing with the degradation of detection and synchronization performance associated to the use of matched filtering with LFM signals in digital communication receivers. Furthermore, the findings of the comparative study of detection based on different metrics can be used as a guideline for the selection of algorithms and the design of reference signals that can meet specific requirements.weiterlesen