Cyclostationary analysis has several applications in communications, e.g., spectral sensing, signal parameter estimation, and modulation classification. Most of them consider the additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) channel model, although wireless communication systems may also be subject to non-Gaussian interference and impulsive noise. In this context, the communication channel can be better modeled by heavy-tailed distributions, such as the non-Gaussian alpha-stable one. Some applications of the cyclostationary approach based on the spatial sign cyclic correlation function (SSCCF), fractional lower-order cyclic autocorrelation function (FLOCAF), and cyclic correntropy function (CCF) demonstrate that these are promising solutions for the analysis of signals in the presence of impulsive non-Gaussian noise. However, the investigation of functions above applied to digital modulation recognition in impulsive environments, and the comparison among them are topics that did not adequately explore yet. This work demonstrates that SSCCF is a particular case of the FLOCAF. Besides, a detailed analysis of the use of the FLOCAF and CCF is presented to obtain cyclostationary descriptors for the recognition of digital modulations BPSK, QPSK, 8-QAM, 16-QAM, and 32-QAM. Automatic modulation classification (AMC) architectures, based on the functions mentioned above, are also proposed. Besides, another contribution showed is that both the FLOCAF and CCF allow the symbol rate parameter estimation. The performances of AMC architectures were evaluated in the scenario with modulated signals contaminated with additive non-Gaussian alpha-stable noise. The results demonstrate that both architectures can classify signals in different contamination scenarios. However, the architecture based on the CCF is more efficient than the FLOCAF-based one.

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The aim of this letter is to propose a new robust method for time delay estimation over impulsive noise and investigate its practical implications. The method uses a nonlinear data transformation associated with the generalized crosscorrelation technique. Hence, simulations and experiments show better performance than traditional methods without increasing the computational cost. Our practical experiments indicate the possibility of obtaining a correlated impulsive noise, in which the proposed method is still presenting accurate estimations.

SUMMARYThe evolution of wireless communication systems leads to Dynamic Spectrum Allocation for Cognitive Radio, which requires reliable spectrum sensing techniques. Among the spectrum sensing methods proposed in the literature, those that exploit cyclostationary characteristics of radio signals are particularly suitable for communication environments with low signal-to-noise ratios, or with non-stationary noise. However, such methods have high computational complexity that directly raises the power consumption of devices which often have very stringent low-power requirements. We propose a strategy for cyclostationary spectrum sensing with reduced energy consumption. This strategy is based on the principle that p processors working at slower frequencies consume less power than a single processor for the same execution time. We devise a strict relation between the energy savings and common parallel system metrics. The results of simulations show that our strategy promises very significant savings in actual devices.