Comparative performance analysis of eight blind source separation methods on radiocommunications signals

Abstract

For about two decades, many second order (SO) and fourth order (FO) blind methods have been developed to separate overdetermined mixtures of statistically independent narrowband (NB) sources. Besides, mainly to overcome some limitations of these methods, sixth order methods have been developed. Nevertheless, despite of this great number of methods, the performance of the latter for arbitrary electromagnetic sources are still almost unknown, which limits their use in operational contexts. The purpose of this paper is to fill the gap previously mentioned by presenting a comparative performance analysis of eight blind source separation (BSS) methods for arbitrary overdetermined mixtures of sources borrowed from the radiocommunications context, and to show off both the advantages and the drawbacks of these methods.