Detection of modern communication signals using frequency domain morphological filtering

Abstract

Safeguarding sensible areas and buildings from unauthorized use of wireless communication or drone intrusion requires a reliable and robust detection of modern communication signals. We present an algorithm for detecting UMTS, LTE and current drone communication signals in adverse environments. Morphological filtering in frequency domain is used to separate the desired signal from perturbations, thus allowing reliable detection. In a first step, the algorithm was validated on synthetic signals with narrowband single carrier perturbations and promising results were obtained. Long term field tests conducted in a prison in Germany revealed high performance in terms of low false alarm rates (0–0.8%) and high sensitivity (98.2–100%).