Large quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM) constellations are currently us
ed in throughput efficient high-speed communication applications such as di
gital TV. For such large signal constellations, carrier-phase synchronizati
on is a crucial problem because for efficiency reasons, the carrier acquisi
tion must often be performed blindly, without the use of training or pilot
sequences, The goal of the present paper is to provide thorough performance
analysis of the blind carrier phase estimators that have been proposed in
the literature and to assess their relative merits.