Characterization of threshold for single tone maximum likelihood frequency estimation

This paper presents a simple and direct approach to understanding the threshold effect associated with maximum likelihood estimation of the frequency of a single complex tone. Motivation for the approach, stemming from known results in the field of phase locked loops, is given. It is shown both theoretically and experimentally that the onset of threshold can be directly characterized by a single, easily computed parameter, namely the Cramer-Rao bound on the phase estimation error variance.>