Hierarchical Classification Method for Radio Frequency Interference Recognition and Characterization in Satcom

Abstract

The Quality of Service (QoS) and security of Satellite Communication (Satcom) are crucial as Satcom plays a significant role in a wide range of applications, such as direct broadcast satellite, earth observation, navigation, and government/military systems. Therefore, it is necessary to ensure that transmissions are incorruptible, particularly in the presence of challenges such as Radio Frequency Interference (RFI), which is of primary concern for the efficiency of communications. The security of a wireless communication system can be improved using a robust RFI detection method, which could, in turn, lead to an effective mitigation process. This paper presents a new method to recognize received signal characteristics using a hierarchical classification in a multi-layer perceptron (MLP) neural network. The considered characteristics are signal modulation and the type of RFI. In the experiments, a real-time video stream transmitted in the direct broadcast satellite is utilized with four modulation types, namely, QPSK, 8APSK, 16APSK, and 32APSK. Moreover, it is assumed that the communication signal can be combined with one of the three significant types of interference, namely, Continuous Wave Interference (CWI), Multiple CWI (MCWI), and Chirp Interference (CI). In addition, two robust feature selection techniques have been developed to select more informative features, which leads to improving the classification precision. Furthermore, the robustness of the trained techniques is assessed to predict unknown signals at different Signal to Noise Ratios (SNRs).