PERFORMANCE EVALUATION OF SINGLE-TONE FREQUENCY ESTIMATORS UNDER NOISY AND IMPERFECT SIGNAL CONDITIONS

It is well known that estimation of the parameters, in particular frequency a complex sinusoid contaminated with noise is one of the crucial problems in the literature as the frequency estimation has been applied in many areas such as communications, instrumentation and radar. There are three significant issues which are accuracy, estimator variance and sensitivity to bias that must be taken into consideration while finding the frequency of a sinusoid. In this study, performances of various estimators in estimating the frequency of single-tone signals are evaluated. Estimators are tested against varying signal-noise-ratio (SNR) and imperfections in signal frequency. The results are presented in terms of estimator bias and estimator variances. Experimental results show that in the case of varying SNR, Quin's estimator outperforms Macleod and quadratic interpolation estimators in accuracy whereas in the case of imperfections in signal frequency, Macleod and quadratic interpolation estimators achieve the most stable results in terms of estimator variance and bias, respectively