Performance evaluation of new blind OFDM signal recognition based on properties of the second-order statistics using universal software radio peripheral platform

Abstract

In the context of cognitive radio (CR) or various military and civilian applications, modulation recognition (MR) is one of the most popular technical processes in the field of communication system recognition, by which the modulation type of the unknown received signal can be identified automatically by estimating one or more parameters of the modulated signal. This paper presents the performance evaluation of the new proposed blind system recognition method using only a particular property of the second-order statistics of the orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) modulated signal. The effectiveness of the proposed method is illustrated using the implementation on universal software radio peripheral (USRP) platform. A comparison with computer simulations using MATLAB software is also performed, emphasizing the good performances of the method while the results obtained are close. We show the efficiency and behavior of the proposed method in the context of wireless communication systems based on OFDM modulation (3GPP/LTE, WiMAX, DVBT-2K, IEEE 802.22-1K,IEEE 802.22-2K, IEEE 802.22-4K). The proposed method can detect OF DM signals among other digital signals in a systematic and intelligent way even with low SNR values (when approaching to SNR=-2dB, the decision criteria tends towards 0).