CycloDSP: A cyclostationary signal analysis tool for GNU Radio

TL;DR

CycloDSP is a new GNU Radio tool that efficiently analyzes cyclostationary signals in real-time, addressing the computational challenges of traditional methods for continuous data streams in SDR applications.

Contribution

This paper introduces CycloDSP, an out-of-tree GNU Radio module optimized for real-time cyclostationary signal analysis on general-purpose computers.

Findings

Real-time estimation of cyclic statistics demonstrated on GMSK signals

Efficient processing of continuous data streams achieved

Applicable to aeronautical telemetry and similar signals

Abstract

In this paper, we present a first attempt to incorporate in the GNU Radio ecosystem a tool called CycloDSP, devoted to the analysis of complex-valued cyclostationary signals. Such signals are ubiquitous in communication and signal processing, exhibiting periodic or almost periodic statistics that are characterized by a countable set of cycle frequencies, which are related to the main signal periodicities. Common cycle frequencies for modulated signals are multiple of the baudrate and/or combination of the carrier frequency and baudrate. Conventional estimation strategies for cyclostationary signal analysis typically exhibit a high computational burden. Many approaches aimed at reducing complexity exploit fast Fourier transform (FFT) algorithms, which are very efficient for batch data but are not suited for continuously streaming data, typically encountered in software-defined radio (SDR) applications. The aim of this paper is to develop an out-of-tree (OOT) GNU Radio module containing a set of building block functions, aimed at estimating functions, such as the cyclic correlation functions, typically employed for cyclostationary signal analysis. The proposed implementation must be designed so as to ensure high efficiency in processing continuous data streams of complex samples, both in terms of computational load and data storage, in order to be executed on general purpose computers. We tested our implementation by estimating in real-time the second-order cyclic statistics of a Gaussian minimum-shift keying (GMSK) modulated signal, which belongs to a class of signals commonly employed in aeronautical telemetry datalinks.