A portable instrument for automatic detection and classification of telecommunication signals

In this paper, a new portable instrument for the analysis of telecommunication signals is proposed, which is able to: (i) observe a wideband in which even multiple signals can be present at different carrier frequencies; (ii) divide the observed wideband in smaller sub-bands and detect the presence of a signal in each sub-band; and (iii) recognize the modulation type of the detected signals, among the most common digital schemes, without requiring any knowledge about their parameters. The proposed instrument, completed with the signal-dependant measurement routines, represents a considerable advancement of the research among the instruments for telecommunication systems, as it is capable of working autonomously on unknown signals. Such feature avoids both the intervention of a skilled operator in setting up the measurement task, and make it ready to be used in the next generation telecommunication scenarios, where a more flexible use of the radio spectrum and a dynamic allocation of users are foreseen. The hardware architecture is based on a PXI data acquisition system and a laptop PC processing unit while the control software has been developed in LabVIEW. The paper proposal has been validated using actual signals in several scenarios emulating real world communications.