Abstract
This paper investigates the asymptotic behavior of the recursive maximum likelihood estimation (RMLE) for timing recovery of PAM signals over AWGN channels. The convergence problem of the RMLE algorithm has been effectively reduced to the stability problem of stationary points of an associated deterministic ordinary differential equation (ODE). We have proved that the RMLE algorithm is consistent, i.e. the sequence of the timing estimates converges w.p.1 to the true value.