Chair of Multimedia Telecommunications and Microelectronics
Publication

Jakub Nikonowicz, Mieczysław Jessa,
Stable field detection as a novel method for blind sensing of weak radio signals,
2nd International Conference on Astrophysics and Particle Physics, San Antonio, USA, 2017, pp. 104-104,
EndNoteCitationDOI

Abstract

Since the discovery of space radio waves in the early 1930s, most astronomical objects have been perceived as radio wavessources. Radio-astronomy observations ultimately consist in measuring the energy received from a distant source, withparticular emphasis on the detection of unknown and weak signals. The most commonly used blind detection method relieson energy detection with noise power estimation. The variability of the radio environment, however, greatly complicates theentire detection process. In order to solve the problem of detection in varying noise conditions, we propose a novel method ofblind signal detection called Stable Field Detection (SFD), which does not require any knowledge of the noise variance. Theproposed method uses the bin value distribution of the received signal’s power spectrum density and the moving average. Itrefers to the mutual relations between the distributions of random variables to extract more information from the spectrumthan normal energy detection. As a result, SFD operates on thresholding Gaussian distribution, which makes it as easy to useas energy detection, but remains much more effective. The simulation results for radio pulses show that the performance ofthe method is significantly improved under the proposed scheme. With regard to weak signals, when compared to the energydetection, the lower limit of the permissible signal-to-noise ratio has been decreased by 4dB. At the same time, the proposedsolution maintains low O (nlogn) computational complexity. SFD is considered a new, effective and simple software defineddetector that addresses the challenges of modern astronomy.