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A novel symbol period estimation method of typical digital communication signal based on the characteristics of periodic modulation and mono-frequency

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Abstract

This study proposes a novel general method for estimating the symbol period of the typical rectangular pulse-shaped digital communication signals, such as the phase shift key signal, the amplitude shift key signal, the quadrature amplitude modulation signal, and the frequency shift key signal. For the received oversampling signal, an observation matrix with dynamic dimension is constructed. By exploiting the characteristics of periodic modulation and mono-frequency, it is shown that under symbol synchronization conditions, only when the dimension of the observation matrix matches the symbol period, each column of the matrix is a continuous sine wave signal without any discontinuous or hopping point. This characteristic is applied to estimate the symbol period by measuring the spectral convergence degree of each column of the observation matrix. At the same time, the estimation failure caused by symbol asynchronization can be eliminated by analyzing and segmenting the observation matrix. The simulation results imply that the proposed method has better estimation performance under similar conditions compared to the methods based on cyclic spectrum and wavelets. Furthermore, the proposed method is superior in that it does not require prior knowledge of the signal modulation type.

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Acknowledgements

We declare that this manuscript is original, has not been published before and is not currently being considered for publication elsewhere.

Funding

This work is supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China under the Grant of Project Nos. 62201579, 62201580 and Scientific Research of NUDT under the Grant of Project No. ZK19-32.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. College of Information and Communication, National University of Defense Technology, Wuhan, 430014, China

    Hang Zhu, Guo-qin Kang, Ming Tan, Xu-guang Xu, Wei Song & Xiao-jun Zou

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  1. Hang Zhu
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  2. Guo-qin Kang
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  3. Ming Tan
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  4. Xu-guang Xu
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  5. Wei Song
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  6. Xiao-jun Zou
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Contributions

HZ and XZ wrote the main manuscript text, MT and XX prepared all the figures, WS and GK reviewed the manuscript.

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Correspondence to Xiao-jun Zou.

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Zhu, H., Kang, Gq., Tan, M. et al. A novel symbol period estimation method of typical digital communication signal based on the characteristics of periodic modulation and mono-frequency. SIViP 18, 181–189 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11760-023-02740-7

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11760-023-02740-7

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