Category: Textbook Signals

Cyclic Polyspectra

Higher-order statistics in the frequency domain for cyclostationary signals. As complicated as it gets at the CSP Blog.

In this post we take a first look at the spectral parameters of higher-order cyclostationarity (HOCS). In previous posts, I have introduced the topic of HOCS and have looked at the temporal parameters, such as cyclic cumulants and cyclic moments. Those temporal parameters have proven useful in modulation classification and parameter estimation settings, and will likely be an important part of my ultimate radio-frequency scene analyzer.

The spectral parameters of HOCS have not proven to be as useful as the temporal parameters unless you include the trivial case where the moment/cumulant order is equal to two. In that case, the spectral parameters reduce to the spectral correlation function, which is extremely useful in CSP (see the TDOA and signal-detection posts for examples).

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Comments on “Cyclostationary Correntropy: Definition and Application” by Fontes et al

Update: See also some other reviews/take-downs of cyclic correntropy on the CSP Blog here and here.

I recently came across a published paper with the title Cyclostationary Correntropy: Definition and Application, by Aluisio Fontes et al. It is published in a journal called Expert Systems with Applications (Elsevier). Actually, it wasn’t the first time I’d seen this work by these authors. I had reviewed a similar paper in 2015 for a different journal.

I was surprised to see the paper published because I had a lot of criticisms of the original paper, and the other reviewers agreed since the paper was rejected. So I did my job, as did the other reviewers, and we tried to keep a flawed paper from entering the literature, where it would stay forever causing problems for readers.

The editor(s) of the journal Expert Systems with Applications did not ask me to review the paper, so I couldn’t give them the benefit of the work I already put into the manuscript, and apparently the editor(s) did not themselves see sufficient flaws in the paper to merit rejection.

It stings, of course, when you submit a paper that you think is good, and it is rejected. But it also stings when a paper you’ve carefully reviewed, and rejected, is published anyway.

Fortunately I have the CSP Blog, so I’m going on another rant. After all, I already did this the conventional rant-free way.

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100-MHz Amplitude Modulation? Comments on “Sub-Nyquist Cyclostationary Detection for Cognitive Radio” by Cohen and Eldar

I came across a paper by Cohen and Eldar, researchers at the Technion in Israel. You can get the paper on the Arxiv site here. The title is “Sub-Nyquist Cyclostationary Detection for Cognitive Radio,” and the setting is spectrum sensing for cognitive radio. I have a question about the paper that I’ll ask below.

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Cyclostationarity of Digital QAM and PSK

PSK and QAM signals form the building blocks for a large number of practical real-world signals. Understanding their probability structure is crucial to understanding those more complicated signals.

Let’s look into the statistical properties of a class of textbook signals that encompasses digital quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM), phase-shift keying (PSK), and pulse-amplitude modulation (PAM). I’ll call the class simply digital QAM (DQAM), and all of its members have an analytical-signal mathematical representation of the form

\displaystyle s(t) = \sum_{k=-\infty}^\infty a_k p(t - kT_0 - t_0) e^{i2\pi f_0 t + i \phi_0}. \hfill  (1)

In this model, k is the symbol index, 1/T_0 = f_{sym} is the symbol rate, f_0 is the carrier frequency (sometimes called the carrier frequency offset), t_0 is the symbol-clock phase, and \phi_0 is the carrier phase. The finite-energy function p(t) is the pulse function (sometimes called the pulse-shaping function). Finally, the random variable a_k is called the symbol, and has a discrete distribution that is called the constellation.

Model (1) is a textbook signal when the sequence of symbols is independent and identically distributed (IID). This condition rules out real-world communication aids such as periodically transmitted bursts of known symbols, adaptive modulation (where the constellation may change in response to the vagaries of the propagation channel), some forms of coding, etc. Also, when the pulse function p(t) is a rectangle (with width T_0), the signal is even less realistic, and therefore more textbooky.

We will look at the moments and cumulants of this general model in this post. Although the model is textbook, we could use it as a building block to form more realistic, less textbooky, signal models. Then we could find the cyclostationarity of those models by applying signal-processing transformation rules that define how the cumulants of the output of a signal processor relate to those for the input.

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Signal Processing Operations and CSP

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 x(t), and I filter it using a linear time-invariant transformation with impulse response function h(t), producing the output y(t), then what is the PSD of y(t)? This input-output relationship is well known and quite useful. The relationship is

\displaystyle S_y^0(f) = \left| H(f) \right|^2 S_x^0(f). \hfill (1)

In (1), the function H(f) is the transfer function of the filter, which is the Fourier transform of the impulse-response function h(t).

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 f = f_0 scales the input frequency component at f_0 by the complex number H(f_0). So it makes sense that the PSD at f_0 is scaled by the squared magnitude of H(f_0). If the filter transfer function is zero at f_0, then the density of averaged power at f_0 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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The Cycle Detectors

CSP shines when the problem involves strong noise or cochannel interference. Here we look at CSP-based signal-presence detection as a function of SNR and SIR.

Let’s take a look at a class of signal-presence detectors that exploit cyclostationarity and in doing so illustrate the good things that can happen with CSP whenever cochannel interference is present, or noise models deviate from simple additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN). I’m referring to the cycle detectors, the first CSP algorithms I ever studied (My Papers [1,4]).

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Radio-Frequency Scene Analysis

Modulation recognition is one thing, holistic radio-frequency scene analysis is quite another.

Update October 2023: RFSA is a Wicked Problem.

So why do I obsess over cyclostationary signals and cyclostationary signal processing? What’s the big deal, in the end? In this post I discuss my view of the ultimate use of cyclostationary signal processing (CSP): Radio-Frequency Scene Analysis (RFSA). Eventually, I hope to create a kind of Star Trek Tricorder for RFSA.

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CSP-Based Time-Difference-of-Arrival Estimation

Time-delay estimation can be used to determine the angle-of-arrival of a signal impinging on two spatially separated signals. This estimation problem gets hard when there is cochannel interference present.

Let’s discuss an application of cyclostationary signal processing (CSP): time-delay estimation. The idea is that sampled data is available from two antennas (sensors), and there is a common signal component in each data set. The signal component in one data set is the time-delayed or time-advanced version of the component in the other set. This can happen when a plane-wave radio frequency (RF) signal propagates and impinges on the two antennas. In such a case, the RF signal arrives at the sensors with a time difference proportional to the distance between the sensors along the direction of propagation, and so the time-delay estimation is also commonly referred to as time-difference-of-arrival (TDOA) estimation.

tdoa_physical_setup
Figure 1. Illustration of the geometric relationship between a transmitter and two receivers in the context of time-delay estimation (or time-difference-of-arrival estimation).

Consider the diagram shown in Figure 1. A distant transmitter emits a signal that is well-modeled as a plane wave once it reaches our two receivers. An individual wavefront of the signal arrives at the two sensors at different times.

The line segment AB is perpendicular to the direction of propagation for the RF signal. The angle \theta is called the angle of arrival (AOA). If we could estimate the AOA, we can tell the direction from which the signal arrives, which could be useful in a variety of settings. Since the triangle ABC is a right triangle, we have

\displaystyle \cos (\theta) = \frac{x}{d}. \hfill (1)

When \theta = 0, the wavefronts first strike receiver 2, then must propagate over x=d meters before striking receiver 1. On the other hand, when \theta = 90^\circ, each wavefront strikes the two receivers simultaneously. In the former case, the TDOA is maximum, and in the latter it is zero. The TDOA can be negative too, so that 180^\circ azimuthal degrees can be determined by estimating the TDOA.

In general, the wavefront must traverse x meters between striking receiver 2 and striking receiver 1,

\displaystyle x = d \cos(\theta). \hfill (2)

Assuming the speed of propagation is c meters/sec, the TDOA is given by

\displaystyle D = \frac{x}{c} = \frac{d\cos{\theta}}{c} \mbox{\rm \ \ seconds}. \hfill (3)

In this post I’ll review several methods of TDOA estimation, some of which employ CSP and some of which do not. We’ll see some of the advantages and disadvantages of the various classes of methods through inspection, simulation, and application to captured data. Consider this post as a starting point to a study or development effort rather than as a definitive performance characterization.

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Square-Root Raised-Cosine PSK/QAM

SRRC PSK and QAM signals form important components of more complicated real-world communication signals. Let’s look at their second-order cyclostationarity here.

Let’s look at a somewhat more realistic textbook signal: The PSK/QAM signal with independent and identically distributed symbols (IID) and a square-root raised-cosine (SRRC) pulse function. The SRRC pulse is used in many practical systems and in many theoretical and simulation studies. In this post, we’ll look at how the free parameter of the pulse function, called the roll-off parameter or excess bandwidth parameter, affects the power spectrum and the spectral correlation function.

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Second-Order Estimator Verification Guide

Use this post to help check the accuracy of your second-order CSP estimators.

Update September 2022: New section on the non-conjugate and conjugate coherence function.

***

In this post I provide some tools for the do-it-yourself CSP practitioner. One of the goals of this blog is to help new CSP researchers and students to write their own estimators and algorithms. This post contains some spectral correlation function and cyclic autocorrelation function estimates and numerically evaluated formulas that can be compared to those produced by anybody’s code.

The signal of interest is, of course, our rectangular-pulse BPSK signal with symbol rate 0.1 (normalized frequency units) and carrier offset 0.05. You can download a MATLAB script for creating such a signal here.

The formula for the SCF for a textbook BPSK signal is published in several places (The Literature [R47], My Papers [6]) and depends mainly on the Fourier transform of the pulse function used by the textbook signal.

We’ll compare the numerically evaluated spectral correlation formula with estimates produced by my version of the frequency-smoothing method (FSM). The FSM estimates and the theoretical functions are contained in a MATLAB mat file here. (I had to change the extension of the mat file from .mat to .doc to allow posting it to WordPress–change it back after downloading. It is a zipped .mat file as of 12/2/22.) In all the results shown here and that you can download, the processed data-block length is 65536 samples and the FSM smoothing width is 0.02 Hz. A rectangular smoothing window is used. For all cycle frequencies except zero (non-conjugate), a zero-padding factor of two is used in the FSM.

For the cyclic autocorrelation, we provide estimates using two methods: inverse Fourier transformation of the spectral correlation estimate and direct averaging of the second-order lag product in the time domain.

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A Gallery of Spectral Correlation

Pictures are worth N words, and M equations, where N and M are large integers.

In this post I provide plots of the spectral correlation for a variety of simulated textbook signals and several captured communication signals. The plots show the variety of cycle-frequency patterns that arise from the disparate approaches to digital communication signaling. The distinguishability of these patterns, combined with the inability to distinguish based on the power spectrum, leads to a powerful set of classification (modulation recognition) features (My Papers [16, 25, 26, 28]).

In all cases, the cycle frequencies are blindly estimated by the strip spectral correlation analyzer (The Literature [R3, R4]) and the estimates used by the FSM to compute the spectral correlation function. MATLAB is then used to plot the magnitude of the spectral correlation and conjugate spectral correlation, as specified by the determined non-conjugate and conjugate cycle frequencies.

There are three categories of signal types in this gallery: textbook signals, captured signals, and feature-rich signals. The latter comprises some captured signals (e.g., LTE) and some simulated radar signals. For the first two signal categories, the three-dimensional surface plots I’ve been using will suffice for illustrating the cycle-frequency patterns and the behavior of the spectral correlation function over frequency. But for the last category, the number of cycle frequencies is so large that the three-dimensional surface is difficult to interpret–it is a visual mess. For these signals, I’ll plot the maximum spectral correlation magnitude over spectral frequency f versus the detected cycle frequency \alpha (as in this post).

A complementary gallery of cyclic autocorrelation functions can be found here.

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Textbook Signals

Yes, the CSP Blog uses the simplest idealized cyclostationary digital signal–rectangular-pulse BPSK–to connect all the different aspects of CSP. But don’t mistake these ‘textbook’ signals for the real world.

What good is having a blog if you can’t offer a rant every once in a while? In this post I talk about what I call textbook signals, which are mathematical models of communication signals that are used by many researchers in statistical signal processing for communications.

We’ve already encountered, and used frequently, the most common textbook signal of all: rectangular-pulse BPSK with independent and identically distributed (IID) bits. We’ve been using this signal to illustrate the cyclostationary signal processing concepts and estimators as they have been introduced. It’s a good choice from the point of view of consistency of all the posts and it is easy to generate and to understand. However, it is not a good choice from the perspective of realism. It is rare to encounter a textbook BPSK signal in the practice of signal processing for communications.

I use the term textbook because the textbook signals can be found in standard textbooks, such as Proakis (The Literature [R44]). Textbook signals stand in opposition to signals used in the world, such as OFDM in LTE, slotted GMSK in GSM, 8PAM VSB with synchronization bits in ATSC-DTV, etc.

Typical communication signals combine a textbook signal with an access mechanism to yield the final physical-layer signal–the signal that is actually transmitted (My Papers [11], [16]). What is important for us, here at the CSP Blog, is that this combination usually results in a signal with radically different cyclostationarity than the textbook component. So it is not enough to understand textbook signals’ cyclostationarity. We must also understand the cyclostationarity of the real-world signal, which may be sufficiently complex to render mathematical modeling and analysis impossible (at least for me). (See also some relevant examples of real-world signals here and here.)

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Signal Selectivity

We can estimate the spectral correlation function of one signal in the presence of another with complete temporal and spectral overlap provided the signal has a unique cycle frequency.

In this post I describe and illustrate the most important property of cyclostationary statistics: signal selectivity. The idea is that the cyclostationary parameters for a single signal can be estimated for that signal even when it is corrupted by strong noise and cochannel interferers. ‘Cochannel’ means that the interferer occupies a frequency band that partially or completely overlaps the frequency band for the signal of interest.

A mixture of received RF signals, whether cochannel or not, is accurately modeled by the simple sum of the signals, as in

x(t) = s_1(t) + s_2(t) + \ldots + s_K(t) + w(t), \hfill (1)

where w(t) is additive noise. We can write this more compactly as

x(t) = \displaystyle \sum_{k=1}^K s_k(t) + w(t). \hfill (2)

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Introduction to Higher-Order Cyclostationarity

Why do we need or care about higher-order cyclostationarity? Because second-order cyclostationarity is insufficient for our signal-processing needs in some important cases.

We’ve seen how to define second-order cyclostationarity in the time- and frequency-domains, and we’ve looked at ideal and estimated spectral correlation functions for a synthetic rectangular-pulse BPSK signal. In future posts, we’ll look at how to create simple spectral correlation estimators, but in this post I want to introduce the topic of higher-order cyclostationarity (HOCS).  This post is more conceptual in nature; for mathematical details about HOCS, see the posts on cyclic cumulants and cyclic polyspectra. Estimators of higher-order parameters, such as cyclic cumulants and cyclic moments, are discussed in this post.

To contrast with HOCS, we’ll refer to second-order parameters such as the cyclic autocorrelation and the spectral correlation function as parameters of second-order cyclostationarity (SOCS).

The first question we might ask is Why do we care about HOCS? And one answer is that SOCS does not provide all the statistical information about a signal that we might need to perform some signal-processing task. There are two main limitations of SOCS that drive us to HOCS.

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The Spectral Correlation Function for Rectangular-Pulse BPSK

Let’s make the spectral correlation function a little less abstract by showing it for a simple textbook BPSK signal.

In this post, I show the non-conjugate and conjugate spectral correlation functions (SCFs) for the rectangular-pulse BPSK signal we generated in a previous post. The theoretical SCF can be analytically determined for a rectangular-pulse BPSK signal with independent and identically distributed bits (see My Papers [6] for example or The Literature [R1]). The cycle frequencies are, of course, equal to those for the CAF for rectangular-pulse BPSK. In particular, for the non-conjugate SCF, we have cycle frequencies of \alpha = k f_{bit} for all integers k, and for the conjugate SCF we have \alpha = 2f_c \pm k f_{bit}.

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The Spectral Correlation Function

Spectral correlation in CSP means that distinct narrowband spectral components of a signal are correlated-they contain either identical information or some degree of redundant information.

Spectral correlation is perhaps the most widely used characterization of the cyclostationarity property. The main reason is that the computational efficiency of the FFT can be harnessed to characterize the cyclostationarity of a given signal or data set in an efficient manner. And not just efficient, but with a reasonable total computational cost, so that one doesn’t have to wait too long for the result.

Just as the normal power spectrum is actually the power spectral density, or more accurately, the spectral density of time-averaged power (or simply the variance when the mean is zero), the spectral correlation function is the spectral density of time-averaged correlation (covariance). What does this mean? Consider the following schematic showing two narrowband spectral components of an arbitrary signal:

scf_schematic
Figure 1. Illustration of the concept of spectral correlation. The time series represented by the narrowband spectral components centered at f-A/2 and f+A/2 are downconverted to zero frequency and their correlation is measured. When A=0, the result is the power spectral density function, otherwise it is referred to as the spectral correlation function. It is non-zero only for a countable set of numbers \{A\}, which are equal to the frequencies of sine waves that can be generated by quadratically transforming the data.

Let’s define narrowband spectral component to mean the output of a bandpass filter applied to a signal, where the bandwidth of the filter is much smaller than the bandwidth of the signal.

The sequence of shaded rectangles on the left are meant to imply a time series corresponding to the output of a bandpass filter centered at f-A/2 with bandwidth B. Similarly, the sequence of shaded rectangles on the right imply a time series corresponding to the output of a bandpass filter centered at f+A/2 with bandwidth B.

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The Cyclic Autocorrelation for Rectangular-Pulse BPSK

Let’s look at a specific example of the cyclic autocorrelation function: the textbook rectangular-pulse BPSK signal with IID symbols.

The cyclic autocorrelation function (CAF) for rectangular-pulse BPSK can be derived as a relatively simple closed-form expression (see My Papers [6] for example or The Literature [R1]). It can be estimated in a variety of ways, which we will discuss in future posts. The non-conjugate cycle frequencies for the signal are harmonics of the bit rate, k f_{bit}, and the conjugate cycle frequencies are the non-conjugate cycle frequencies offset by the doubled carrier, or 2f_c + k f_{bit}.

Recall that our simulated rectangular-pulse BPSK signal has 10 samples per bit, or a bit rate of 0.1, and a carrier offset of 0.05, all in normalized units (meaning the sampling rate is unity). We’ve previously selected a sampling rate of 1.0 MHz to provide a little physical realism; let’s do that here too. This choice means the bit rate is 100 kHz and the carrier offset frequency is 50 kHz. From these numbers, we see that the non-conjugate cycle frequencies are k 100 kHz, and that the conjugate cycle frequencies are 2(50) + k 100 kHz, or 100 + k 100 kHz.

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Creating a Simple CS Signal: Rectangular-Pulse BPSK

We’ll use this simple textbook signal throughout the CSP Blog to illustrate and tie together all the different aspects of CSP.

To test the correctness of various CSP estimators, we need a sampled signal with known cyclostationary parameters. Additionally, the signal should be easy to create and understand. A good candidate for this kind of signal is the binary phase-shift keyed (BPSK) signal with rectangular pulse function.

PSK signals with rectangular pulse functions have infinite bandwidth because the signal bandwidth is determined by the Fourier transform of the pulse, which is a sinc() function for the rectangular pulse. So the rectangular pulse is not terribly practical–infinite bandwidth is bad for other users of the spectrum. However, it is easy to generate, and its statistical properties are known.

So let’s jump in. The baseband BPSK signal is simply a sequence of binary (\pm 1) symbols convolved with the rectangular pulse. The MATLAB script make_rect_bpsk.m does this and produces the following plot:

rect_bpsk_time_domain
Figure 1. Time-domain plot of a baseband (not yet modulated by a carrier) rectangular-pulse BPSK signal with bit rate 1/10.

The signal alternates between amplitudes of +1 and -1 randomly. After frequency shifting and adding white Gaussian noise, we obtain the power spectrum estimate:

rect_bpsk_psd
Figure 2. Power spectrum estimate for a simulated rectangular-pulse BPSK signal in noise. The signal power is unity, or 0 dB, and the noise power is 1/10, or -10 dB. The bit rate is 1/10 and the carrier offset frequency is 0.05. Note that the nulls (minima) of the signal spectrum are at 0.05 \pm k/10, or harmonics of the bit rate offset by the carrier.

The power spectrum plot shows why the rectangular-pulse BPSK signal is not popular in practice. The range of frequencies for which the signal possesses non-zero average power is infinite, so it will interfere with signals “nearby” in frequency. However, it is a good signal for us to use as a test input in all of our CSP algorithms and estimators.

The MATLAB script that creates the BPSK signal and the plots above is here. It is an m-file but I’ve stored it in a .doc file due to WordPress limitations I can’t yet get around.