Performance aspects of the adjustable bandwidth concept (ABC) predetection processor

摘要

There are a variety of domains in which signal channelization has proven to be useful, including the time, frequency, spatial and polarization domains. These partitioning techniques are necessary for the proper management and effective utilization of the overall channel resource. The term "multi-channel" is used to describe this partitioning of these domains. However, there are other "domains" in which channelization techniques can be employed. These include the coding domain (as in code-division multiple-access) and the less obvious steganographic domain. One can argue thai these latter examples of domains lack the physical interpretation of their counterparts, or that they are each in fact a clever use of the standard domains. But from the view of the overall channel resource, very effective utilization and management tools can be developed, operated and described in these domains. In this paper, a technique is studied which is based upon a novel utilization of the signal bandwidth domain, for preprocessing prior to detection and parameter estimation. Experimental and theoretical results will be given for assessment of device performance. The studied technique is referred to as the Adjustable Bandwidth Concept (ABC) signal energy detector. When implemented digitally, this device is essentially a cepstral-based pre-processor for generating multiple channels for the analysis and detection of signal components of distinguishable bandwidths. The ABC device processes an input log-magnitude spectrogram and results in a multi-channel output. Each output channel contains information regarding the input spectrogram which is sorted or partitioned based on the bandwidth of signal components within the spectrogram. A primary application of such a device is as a pre-processing step prior to detection and estimation, for automated spectral survey and characterization.