Search Results (6)

This paper is devoted to software-defined radio (SDR) implementation of frequency modulated antipodal chaos shift keying (FM-ACSK) transceiver and presents results of prototype testing in real conditions. This novel and perspective class of spread-spectrum communication systems employs chaotic synchronization for the acquisition and tracking of the analog chaotic spreading code and does not need resource-demanding cross-correlation. The main motivation of the given work is to assess the performance of FM-ACSK in real conditions and demonstrate that chaotic synchronization can be considered an efficient spread-spectrum demodulation method. The work focuses on the real-time implementation aspects of the modulation-demodulation algorithms, forward error correction (FEC) and symbol timing synchronization approach in MATLAB Simulink. The performance of the presented prototype is assessed via extensive testing, which includes measurement of bit error ratio (BER) in single-user and multi-user scenarios, estimation of carrier frequency offset (CFO) impact and image transmission over-the-air between two independent sites and comparison with classical frequency hopping spread spectrum (FHSS). The paper shows that the presented class of the spread spectrum communication systems demonstrates good performance in low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) conditions and in terms of BER significantly outperforms the classic spread-spectrum modulation schemes which employ correlation-based detection. Full article

Frequency hopping spread spectrum (FHSS) applies widely to communication and radar systems to ensure communication information and channel signal quality by tuning frequency within a wide frequency range in a random sequence. An efficient signal processing scheme to resolve the timing and duration signature from an FHSS signal provides crucial information for signal detection and radio band management purposes. In this research, hopping time was first identified by a two-dimensional temporal correlation function (TCF). The timing information was shown at TCF phase discontinuities. To enhance and resolve the timing signature of TCF in a noisy environment, three stages of signature enhancement and morphological matching processes were applied: first, computing the TCF of the FHSS signal and enhancing discontinuities via wavelet transform; second, a dual-diagonal edge finding scheme to extract the timing pattern signature and eliminate mismatching distortion morphologically; finally, Hough transform resolved the agile frequency timing from purified line segments. A grand-scale Monte Carlo simulation of the FHSS signals with additive white Gaussian noise was carried out in the research. The results demonstrated reliable hopping time estimation obtained in SNR at 0 dB and above, with a minimal false detection rate of 1.79%, while the prior related research had an unattended false detection rate of up to 35.29% in such a noisy environment. Full article

The frequency-hopping spread spectrum (FHSS) technique is widely used in secure communications. In this technique, the signal carrier frequency hops over a large band. The conventional non-compressed receiver must sample the signal at high rates to catch the entire frequency-hopping range, which is unfeasible for wide frequency-hopping ranges. In this paper, we propose an efficient adaptive compressed method to measure and detect the FHSS signals non-cooperatively. In contrast to the literature, the FHSS signal-detection method proposed in this paper is achieved directly with compressed sampling rates. The measurement kernels (the non-zero coefficients in the measurement matrix) are designed adaptively, using continuously updated knowledge from the compressed measurement. More importantly, in contrast to the iterative optimizations of the measurement matrices in the literature, the deep neural networks are trained once using task-specific information optimization and repeatedly implemented for measurement kernel design, enabling efficient adaptive detection of the FHSS signals. Simulations show that the proposed method provides stably low missing detection rates, compared to the compressed detection with random measurement kernels and the recently proposed method. Meanwhile, the measurement design in the proposed method is shown to provide improved efficiency, compared to the commonly used recursive method. Full article

In a frequency hopping spread spectrum (FHSS) network, the hopping pattern plays an important role in user authentication at the physical layer. However, recently, it has been possible to trace the hopping pattern through a blind estimation method for frequency hopping (FH) signals. If the hopping pattern can be reproduced, the attacker can imitate the FH signal and send the fake data to the FHSS system. To prevent this situation, a non-replicable authentication system that targets the physical layer of an FHSS network is required. In this study, a radio frequency fingerprinting-based emitter identification method targeting FH signals was proposed. A signal fingerprint (SF) was extracted and transformed into a spectrogram representing the time–frequency behavior of the SF. This spectrogram was trained on a deep inception network-based classifier, and an ensemble approach utilizing the multimodality of the SFs was applied. A detection algorithm was applied to the output vectors of the ensemble classifier for attacker detection. The results showed that the SF spectrogram can be effectively utilized to identify the emitter with 97% accuracy, and the output vectors of the classifier can be effectively utilized to detect the attacker with an area under the receiver operating characteristic curve of 0.99. Full article

In frequency-hopping spread-spectrum (FHSS) systems, jammer detection and mitigation are important but difficult. Each slot of the FHSS experiences frequency-selective fading and unequal transceiver-frequency gains that hinder the detection of jammed slots and result in a poor bit-error rate (BER). To increase BER performance, we first propose a noise-jammer power estimator (NJPE) that estimates noise and jammer powers regardless of different channel gains, and derived its normalized Cramér–Rao bound (NCRB). Second, we developed a jammer detector based on gamma distribution, and designed a restoration method combining all nonjammed slots. Computer simulations verified the derived NCRB of the proposed NJPE by normalized mean squared error (NMSE), and showed that the jammer-detection probability of the proposed jammer detector was better than that of conventional detectors. The BER performance of the proposed method was also shown to be better than that of conventional methods. Full article

It is challenging to detect and track frequency hopping spread spectrum (FHSS) signals due to their wideband frequencies and the limitations of current hardware. In the implementation, there has been a trend of conducting compressive sensing for blind signal processing of FHSS signals. The modulated wideband converter (MWC) is a type of sub-Nyquist sampling system, which accomplishes the recovery of highly accurate broadband sparse signals by multichannel sub-Nyquist sampling sequences. However, it is difficult to adjust MWC to FHSS signals, because the support set and sparsity change with the hop. In this paper, we propose a channelized MWC scheme in order to solve these problems. First, the proposed method distributes the sub-bands to different channels. We can derive and refresh the frequency support set rapidly without recovery. Secondly, by reconstructing the low-pass filter and decimation, we reduced the computational cost to 1/m as the traditional m-channel MWC scheme, where m is the number of channels. Moreover, we propose a series of strategies to estimate carrier frequency. The numerical simulations show that our method can detect the channel, which contains FHSS signals in the case of a low signal-to-noise ratio. Furthermore, the estimation method leads to the successful estimation of the FHSS carrier frequency. This indicates that our method is also effective in the broadband non-cooperative spectrum sensing. Full article