Pulse or digital communications – Systems using alternating or pulsating current
Reexamination Certificate
1999-06-04
2002-07-30
Vo, Don N. (Department: 2631)
Pulse or digital communications
Systems using alternating or pulsating current
Reexamination Certificate
active
06426977
ABSTRACT:
BACKGROUND OF THE INVENTION
1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to structures and algorithms for generating and receiving signals for communications, surveillance, and navigation.
2. Description of Related Art and General Background
Applications for Noise-like Signal
In certain wireless communications, surveillance, and navigation (CSN) applications, it is desirable to transmit a signal such that an unintended recipient would perceive the signal as no more than background noise (as discussed in references SD1-SD3, which documents are hereby incorporated by reference). One such application is covert communications systems, wherein a signal disguised as noise becomes harder for a curious interloper to detect. Such signals are said to exhibit a ‘low probability of detection’ (LPD). Another such application is multiple access systems, wherein it is theorized that the interference caused by other users' signals would be reduced by making the signals more noise-like.
Transmit Issues
In covert communications systems, the object is to communicate in such a manner that an unfriendly party will be unable to detect the presence of the communications signal. While low power techniques for such communications exist, they involve an obvious and unavoidable tradeoff between evading detection and maintaining a robust communications link. Conventional direct sequence spread spectrum (DSSS) techniques spread the bandwidth of digital data signals over a wide frequency band by modulating them with a binary pseudonoise (PN) spreading sequence. Although the power spectral density of such a signal may be below the noise floor, the binary structure of a DSSS signal makes it vulnerable to detection, e.g., by cyclostationary signal processing techniques (as discussed in references SD1-SD3, incorporated by reference above, and SD4-SD12, which documents are hereby incorporated by reference).
Receive Issues
Rake combining is one technique that has proven to be particularly important to effective communications in restrictive environments, such as high-density urban areas, and also in dynamic scenarios (e.g. communications in the presence of moving vehicles). Due to the presence of multiple reflecting objects, a transmitted signal arrives at a receiver not only via a direct line-of-sight path, but also via multiple indirect paths. The latter so-called multipath signals are delayed and attenuated replicas of the direct signal. An important attribute of DSSS techniques is based on the fact that the spreading sequences are chosen to have autocorrelation functions that approach delta functions (i.e. impulses). Therefore, individual multipath instances of the originally transmitted signal within a received signal may reliably be located and tracked in time. This tracking capacity allows the energy from several multipath instances of the same transmitted signal to be extracted from the received signal, time-aligned, and combined coherently, thereby significantly improving the signal-to-noise ratio. (In contrast, multipath interference is extremely difficult to remove from non-DSSS communications signals and can render them undecipherable.) Rake receivers are commonly used to implement these tracking and combining functions in DSSS systems and are well understood by those of ordinary skill in the art (as discussed in reference B.9, which document is hereby incorporated by reference).
Characteristics of Noise
Background noise has a character which may change according to the particular environment in which a receiver is operating, but one component which is always present is receiver thermal noise. Such noise typically has white Gaussian statistics, in that the values of any set of samples taken from a segment of thermal noise will tend to have a normal distribution. Additionally white Gaussian noise has the following properties:
P1) Auto-correlation functions with no sidelobes
P2) Flat spectra
P3) No correlation with delayed replicas
P4) Real and imaginary parts of signal uncorrelated for all reference phases.
In order to make a communications signal look like noise and thereby blend into the thermal noise ensemble, it is desirable to design the signal to have the foregoing properties. Signals with Gaussian statistics also provide protection against some forms of advanced cyclostationary signal detection receivers (as discussed in references SD4-SD19). One way to produce a signal having Gaussian statistics from a binary-valued input is through the use of a matched pair of covering and uncovering modules. The covering module, which is located in the transmitter, acts to transform the highly detectable binary input sequences into a highly noise-like sequence (at the same sample rate) which is then smoothed, up-converted, and transmitted. The uncovering module, which is located in the receiver, reverses the transformation and converts the sampled noise-like signal into a useful approximation of the input sequence.
Conventional Block-based Techniques
Most conventional implementations of covering/uncovering module pairs are block-based, in that each block of input data is covered, transmitted, and uncovered as a discrete unit. Examples include fixed-length transform techniques such as the Fourier and discrete wavelet transform approaches (as discussed in references SD15-SD19). If the block size is sufficiently large and the distribution of the input data is sufficiently random, many such methods may produce an output having Gaussian statistics. However, care must be exercised in order to ensure that the block edges do not create a periodic feature detectable by cyclostationary detectors (as discussed in references SD4-D11). An additional vulnerability of the Fourier transform approach is that it is a known fixed-length transform that may readily be replicated by a curious interloper attempting to uncover the underlying binary signal.
Block-based covering/uncovering modules severely impact two significant receiver requirements: 1) the need for synchronization, and 2) the need to degrade as little as possible the performance of receiver rake-combining operations. For example, one conventional block-based method synthesizes the spectrum of the output signal directly from the input baseband data and then uses a discrete inverse Fourier transform to generate the corresponding block of time-domain coefficients for transmission. In this approach, the input block to the covering module represents the desired output spectrum and the output block of the covering module represents the complex values of the corresponding time-domain coefficients. The discrete direct Fourier transform which serves as the uncovering applique, however, is not shift invariant: the particular time index with which each received coefficient is associated depends on the coefficient's place within the received block. If the receiver applies the wrong block boundaries to the received signal, the received time coefficients will become associated with the wrong time indices. In this case the result of decoding the signal will not be merely a shifted version of the transmitted data; rather, it may not resemble the transmitted data at all. Therefore, it is necessary for the pair of covering/uncovering modules to observe exactly the same block boundaries.
One way to ensure that both covering and uncovering modules adhere to the same boundary convention is for the operations of the covering and uncovering modules to be synchronized in time. Each module could utilize a local clock for this purpose, but unavoidable variations between the clocks' frequencies would soon destroy any initial condition of synchronization between them. Unfortunately, it is also typically impossible to reliably synchronize the transmitter and receiver to a time reference outside the communications channel (i.e. within a transmitted reference channel), because changes in the environment and/or the relative positions of the transmitter, receiver, and time reference will induce unequal phase shifts in the synchronization and communications channels and thereby
Bially Theodore
Hampton Jerry R.
Lee Harry B.
Nicholson David L.
Atlantic Aerospace Electronics Corporation
Pillsbury & Winthrop LLP
Vo Don N.
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