How does the cyclostationarity of a signal change when it is subjected to common signal-processing operations like addition, multiplication, and convolution?
It is often useful to know how a signal processing operation affects the probabilistic parameters of a random signal. For example, if I know the power spectral density (PSD) of some signal
, and I filter it using a linear time-invariant transformation with impulse response function
, producing the output
, then what is the PSD of
? This input-output relationship is well known and quite useful. The relationship is

In (1), the function
is the transfer function of the filter, which is the Fourier transform of the impulse-response function
.
Because the mathematical models of real-world communication signals can be constructed by subjecting idealized textbook signals to various signal-processing operations, such as filtering, it is of interest to us here at the CSP Blog to know how the spectral correlation function of the output of a signal processor is related to the spectral correlation function for the input. Similarly, we’d like to know such input-output relationships for the cyclic cumulants and the cyclic polyspectra.
Another benefit of knowing these CSP input-output relationships is that they tend to build insight into the meaning of the probabilistic parameters. For example, in the PSD input-output relationship (1), we already know that the transfer function at
scales the input frequency component at
by the complex number
. So it makes sense that the PSD at
is scaled by the squared magnitude of
. If the filter transfer function is zero at
, then the density of averaged power at
should vanish too.
So, let’s look at this kind of relationship for CSP parameters. All of these results can be found, usually with more mathematical detail, in My Papers [6, 13].
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