The present disclosure generally relates to the field of cognitive radio transmission, reception, and dynamic control, for satellite communications (SATCOM) in a Radio Frequency Interference (RFI) environment. More particularly, the disclosure relates to anti-jamming methods and a cognitive radio testbed apparatus in SATCOM.
In the satellite communications (SATCOM) infrastructure, both space-borne and hybrid space-terrestrial systems will require assured connection capabilities, enhanced defensive control, and robust performance to support complex collaborative missions.
Wideband geosynchronous orbit (GEO) SATCOM can provide high-capacity and long haul communications for various terrestrial applications, industry operations, and interested users. GEO SATCOM continuous operation is critical to individual, cooperation, and government operations.
Each GEO satellite provides services in both the X and Ka frequency bands, with the capability to cross-band between the two frequencies onboard the satellite. It features an electrically steerable and phased array X-band, a mechanically steered Ka-band, and a fixed earth-coverage X-band. These wideband SATCOM networks entail extreme complexity, operating environment unpredictability, and interference susceptibility.
Therefore, it is essential to develop cognitive spectrum management solutions that are not only context-aware and capable of learning and probing for subscriber distributions, quality of services, mission priorities and traffic patterns, but also agile in waveform adaptation to provide active countermeasures for persistent and adaptive RF interferences (RFI).
In addition, to provide accurate and reliable performance evaluation results to guide cognitive spectrum SATCOM development, abstracted system models must be built practically to evaluate various important techniques, including frequency-hopping spread spectrum (FHSS), channel coding, and anti-jamming capability. The practical models include FHSS and unified interferences model. The performance evaluation metric is unified system spectrum efficiency and system energy efficiency.
One aspect or embodiment of the present disclosure includes cross-layer design for anti-jamming methods in a satellite communication (SATCOM) system. Various network traffic packets are firstly partitioned as frames, which are processed with baseband signaling system parameters. With the signaling configuration, information bits are encoded with forward error correction (FEC) scheme. The bits are then formed into symbols based on the bit-to-symbol mapping scheme. To avoid severe interferences, frequency hopping (FH) is applied. For further interferences mitigation, beamforming is applied to transmit the signal in a desired direction. At the receiver, interference nulling or an equivalent scheme is applied to reduce the intentional interferences power. Afterwards, the frequency de-hopping and synchronizations are performed to transform the radio frequency signal to baseband signal. Symbol de-mapping and FEC decoding is then performed for the link performance measurement.
In response to interferences, a game reasoning process is performed to configure system parameters including transmission power, traffic data rate, modulation and coding (MODCOD), and the beamforming precoding matrix, to provide a cross-layer anti-jamming adaptive waveform.
Optionally, different FEC schemes are applied in light or heavy interferences environments for quality of services (QoS) improvement while maintaining low recovering complexity.
Optionally, the waveform modulation is performed to transmit the signal in one of a number of frequency bands.
Optionally, beamforming is applied for multiple antennas transmitter to enhance directional performance.
Optionally, the interferences of narrowband interference, wideband interference, radar sources, and intelligence jammers states can be estimated via space object automatic target detection, recognition, and classification methods.
Optionally, the interferences are classified as both intentional and unintentional interferences.
Optionally, interference nulling at a receiver is performed for multiple antennas receiver configurations or omitted for single antenna system.
Optionally, a game reasoning process obtains the following information: a space object propagator provides the location and a speed of a current satellite in the SATCOM system; a SATCOM performance evaluation toolkit determines the link budget information, and the spectrum sensing determines the situational awareness of the current SATCOM link.
Optionally, in the game reasoning process, a transmission pair and adversaries are included.
Optionally, the game reasoning process is implemented by, the transmitter, the receiver, and the jammers, each including a Universal Software Radio Peripheral (USRP) configured with Gnu's not Unix (GNU) Radio.
Optionally, each player obtains the information of the opponent by spectrum sensing and signal detection.
Optionally, the traffic includes voice traffic, video traffic, image traffic, and text.
Optionally, the waveform of the source data includes a wideband GEO SATCOM waveform transmitted in the SATCOM system via GEO satellites.
Optionally, after the anti-jamming adaptive waveform is selected by the game engine, the anti-jamming waveform is then transmitted with the signaling by the transmitter to the receiver, which is then demodulated and decoded for information recovery.
Optionally, performance measurements include the frame error rate, system outage, spectrum efficiency, and energy efficiency.
Other aspects or embodiments of the present disclosure can be understood by those skilled in the art in light of the description, the claims, and the drawings of the present disclosure.
The following drawings are merely examples for illustrative purposes according to various disclosed embodiments and are not intended to limit the scope of the present disclosure.
Reference will now be made in detail to exemplary embodiments of the disclosure, which are illustrated in the accompanying drawings. Wherever possible, the same reference numbers will be used throughout the drawings to refer to the same or like parts. In the following description, reference is made to the accompanying drawings that form a part thereof, and in which is shown by way of illustration specific exemplary embodiments in which the disclosure may be practiced.
These embodiments are described in sufficient detail to enable those skilled in the art to practice the disclosure and it is to be understood that other embodiments may be utilized and that changes may be made without departing from the scope of the disclosure. The following description is, therefore, merely exemplary.
Various embodiments provide an effective interference mitigation strategy in a satellite communication (SATCOM) system with cross-layer design.
Suppose there is a cognitive radio communication transmitter-receiver pair, operating in an open wireless environment where there could be intentional and unintentional RFI signals. The communication pair are separated with distance dTR. The information bits at the transmitter are divided into frames. In each frame, there are L uncoded information bits and L0 overhead bits. The information bits and overhead bits are encoded with a channel encoder with coding rate r. For a system with M-ary modulation scheme, the number of symbols in each frame is Ls=(L+L0)/(r log2 M), where L is chosen in a way such that Ls is an integer.
To avoid severe RFI, the transmitter and receiver employ a frequency hopping (FH) scheme. Suppose there are N channels for the cognitive communication pair to communicate.
For different types of RFI, there are 1≤n≤N sub-channels that could be interfered. Therefore, considering both intentional and unintentional interference, the received signal samples in discrete-time at receiver can be represented as
y
m=√{square root over (Er)}hm(TR)xm+√{square root over (EI)}hm(1R)km+nm, m=1,2, . . . , Ls
where Er and EI are the average received symbol energy from transmitter and synchronized aggregated RFI nodes respectively; xm∈ S is the m-th modulated symbol at transmitter, with S being the modulation alphabet set with the cardinality M=|S|, km and zm are the unknown synchronized interference and rest overall interference signal during the m-th symbol period, ym, hm(TR), hm(IR), and nm are the received sample, the fading coefficient between transmitter and receiver, the fading coefficient between the aggregated RFI node and receiver, and additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) with single-sided power spectral density N0=2σ2, respectively. The zm can be modeled as a Gaussian random variable with mean μ and variance 2α2, which is quite flexible to model many weak interferes with varied μ and 2α2 values. It is assumed that the transmitter and aggregated RFI node transmit each signal to receiver undergoes different path, therefore providing the independent path fading of hm(TR) and hm(IR).
To quantify the communication pair transmission effectiveness, spectral efficiency (SE) and energy efficiency (EE) are utilized as two metrics. The SE, ηSE is defined as the average data rate per unit bandwidth, which quantifies how efficient the precious spectrum is utilized to transmit information. The EE, ηEE, is defined as the successfully transmitted information bits per unit energy, which quantifies the average energy consumption to successfully transmit an information bit.
Based on the spectrum efficiency definition, the communication pair system SE can be represented as
where Rd is the net data rate of the successfully transmitted information bit, (1+β)Rs is the signal occupied bandwidth with β being the roll-off factor of the pulse shaping filter and Rs is the gross symbol rate. Note that in RF open wireless communications, each frame cannot be guaranteed to be transmitted successfully in one transmission attempt, because of the signal distortions caused by channel fading, intentional and unintentional interference, and noise, etc. Therefore, retransmissions must be incorporated to obtain the ηSE.
The probability that a frame can be successfully transmitted equals to 1-Φ, where Φ is the system outage probability which quantifies the frame transmission quality-of-services (QoS). Note that the communication system outage depends on many system parameters, including received signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR), the transmission modulation and channel coding scheme, and the FH design, etc. For an automatic repeat request (ARQ) protocol, the average number of retransmissions is
The system spectrum efficiency can then be calculated as
Next, we derive the cognitive radio system energy efficiency in the condition of RFIs. Denote Eb as the average energy per uncoded information bit received at the receiver during one transmission attempt. The average SINR at the receiver is therefore
With a large-scale power path-loss model, the energy consumption for each symbol transmission at transmitter is
E
s
=E
r
G
1
d
TK
κ
M
l
where κ is the path-loss exponent, G1 is the gain factor at a unit distance including path-loss and antenna gain, and Ml is the link margin compensating the hardware process variations and other additive background noise and interference.
To derive a comprehensive energy efficiency of a communication system, the hardware energy consumption must be added to the information transmission energy consumption, which is positive proportional to the transmission energy consumption, which can be modeled as
where ηA is the drain efficiency of the power amplifier, ξM is the peak-to-average power ratio (PAPR) of an M-ary modulation signal, and ω incorporates the effects of baseband processing at both transmitter and receiver, including signal processing, modulation and demodulation, channel encoding and decoding, etc, which can be treated as a constant in a frame with the designed transceiver structure.
The total energy consumption for the transmission of an information bit in one transmission attempt, E0=(Es+Ec)Ls/L can be represented as
where Gd=G1dTRκMl and Rb=RsL/Ls is the net bit rate of uncoded information bits.
Considering the frame retransmissions, the total required energy to successfully transmit an information bit from the transmitter to the receiver can then be obtained.
For the cognitive radio communication pair, it is desired to achieve both large SE and EE; however, the two metrics construct the fundamental trade-off in wireless communications. For a larger system SE, it is better for the transmitter to ensure the successful transmission probability of each frame by utilizing spectrum efficiently; which however requires more energy support, resulting in smaller EE, and vice versa.
Therefore, instead of maximizing either SE or EE, without considering the other one, we utilize a unified metric SEE (Spectral/Energy Efficiency) for a general trade-off configuration between SE and EE to fit for various scenarios and different system performances requirements. The SEE is defined as
ηSEE=ηSE1−λ/Etλ
where λ is the weight represents the system preference of SE and EE, satisfying 0≤λ≤1. It can be seen that maximizing the SEE will increase ηSE or reduce energy consumption Et, thus achieve a balanced trade-off between the SE and EE. Besides, the SEE is general and can be easily reduced to situations considering only the maximization of SE or EE for different system scenario requirements, i.e., λ can be set to 1 for a system considering only maximizing the EE for a device long working life time, and λ set to 0 for spectrum resource maximum utilization. With the derivation of ηSE and Et, the ηSEE can then be obtained.
The unified metric ηSEE incorporates a number of system parameters, including SINR at the receiver, the number of information bits L in each frame, the information transmission modulation and channel coding scheme, and the system outage probability Φ which inherently depends on all the above parameters, with the weight coefficient λ to adjust preference weights between SE and EE.
It can be seen that the analysis of ηSEE relies on the system outage Φ expression,
Φ0=f(γ=γ0)
where γ0 is the SINR threshold.
To obtain insights of interference impact to SATCOM communication pair for further adaptive configuration, |hm(TR)|2 is set to 1 and χ1=|hm(IR)|2≥0 is modeled with general Nakagami distribution, which is
where m1 is the channel fading shape factor and γ(·) is the incomplete gamma function. Note that the general Nakagami fading channel is flexible to model different channels, including AWGN, Rayleigh, and Rician fading channel.
The FH system outage can then be expressed as
For a FH system, the center frequency of the communication pair varies with the assigned pseudo-random sequence, where the transmitted frequency can be seen as selected uniformly from the total frequency bandwidth W. Thus, RFI signals cannot always interfere the communication system, and FH scheme has shown to be an effective anti-RFI technique in severe hostile environment. The probability of a transmitted signal will be interfered is n/N.
Suppose the total signal transmission power and interference received power of aggregated RFI signals on the whole available bandwidth is P and PJ, respectively. The interference power on each channel for different types of RFI is then Pl=J0B=PJ/n, where J0 is the interference power spectral density.
Therefore, the average outage probability for a FH system with RFIs, is
where Ω=|μ|2+2α2.
Finally, the unified communication pair performance evaluation metric expression is
At the same time, a practical cognitive radio transceiver always has a power limit, satisfying 0<P≤P0, where P0 is the transmission power constraint.
The system optimum design for cognitive radio configuration, including power control P, information bits rate control Rb, the modulation scheme, and channel coding scheme, which can maximize the communication system unified SEE is discussed. Note that in many communication standards, the modulation schemes and channel coding schemes are often paired with each other to form a modulation and coding (MODCOD) combination table, such as in Digital Video Broadcasting-Satellite-Second Generation (DVB-S2) standard.
The optimization problem to a tuple (P, Rb,(M, r)) can be represented as
Due to the high complexity representation and non-linearity of ηSEE, we transform the optimization metric to Ψ=log ηSEE. Note that because of the monotonically increasing function of ηSEE=exp(Ψ), the maximum Ψ gives the maximum ηSEE.
To solve the optimization problem, the constrained optimization is relaxed to the unconstrained problem, and by setting ∂Ψ/∂P=0 with ∂Ψ/∂Rb=0.
Power Selection (POWSEL): For a cognitive radio frequency hopping communication system in the RFI environment, the optimum transmission power P that maximizes the unified SE and EE is given by min [P′, P0], where P′>0 is the solution of the following equation and P′+∞ when the following equation does not have solution.
Data Rate Selection (DRSEL): For a cognitive radio frequency hopping communication system in the RFI environment, the optimum information bits data rate Rb that maximizes the unified SE and EE is given by
It can be seen that the closed-form solution of Rb is expressed as a function of the transmission power P, employed modulation scheme and channel coding scheme. Therefore, for a communication system with fixed values of above system parameters, the optimum value of information bits rate control can be directly calculated.
However, for a cognitive transmitter, which may has the capability to adjust all the above system parameters, where the joint optimization of transmission power P, information bits rate Rb, and MODCOD is required. To obtain the joint optimum values of tuple (P, Rb, (M, r)), the above two equations can be treated as two system equations of the parameters. However, due to the nonlinear functionality and high complexity to obtain the necessary conditions for (M,r), the optimum solution for tuple ({circumflex over (P)}, {circumflex over (R)}b, ({circumflex over (M)}, {circumflex over (r)})) is not easy to be directly obtained. An effective iterative algorithm can then be developed to obtain the joint optimum values of P, Rb, and (M, r).
In
In
In
In
In the game model formulation, the aggregated effective data rate in each carrier is formed in the transmission pair side.
For example, the interferers may try to interrupt the data transmission from the transmitter to the receiver. A Universal Software Radio Peripheral (USRP) and Gnu's not Unix (GNU) Radio based hardware testbed apparatus has been implemented to demonstrate the integrated game theory enabled spectrum management and waveform adaptation. It is emulated that the interference and anti-interference conflicts in the frequency band of 1.3 GHz to 1.6 GHz.
When transmitting video stream or video data, interference and anti-interference experiments may be performed using the hardware-in-loop implementation setup as shown in
As such, in addition to the game theoretic model for anti-jamming waveform adaptation, the present disclosure also provides a hardware-in-loop cognitive radio testbed apparatus used for implementing the disclosed anti-jamming method in a SATCOM system. An exemplary testbed apparatus includes the RF transmitter, the RF receiver, and jammers, each with Universal Software Radio Peripheral (USRP) and Gnu's not Unix (GNU) Radio to demonstrate the game theoretic anti-jamming capabilities via spectrum management and waveform adaptation. In embodiments, the hardware testbed apparatus may include a set of DVB-S2 transmitters and receivers.
While the disclosure has been illustrated with respect to one or more implementations, alterations and/or modifications can be made to the illustrated examples without departing from the spirit and scope of the appended claims. In addition, while a particular feature of the disclosure may have been disclosed with respect to only one of several implementations, such feature may be combined with one or more other features of the other implementations as may be desired and advantageous for any given or particular function. Furthermore, to the extent that the terms “including”, “includes”, “having”, “has”, “with”, or variants thereof are used in either the detailed description and the claims, such terms are intended to be inclusive in a manner similar to the term “comprising.” The term “at least one of” is used to mean one or more of the listed items can be selected.
Notwithstanding that the numerical ranges and parameters setting forth the broad scope of the disclosure are approximations, the numerical values set forth in the specific examples are reported as precisely as possible. Any numerical value, however, inherently contains certain errors necessarily resulting from the standard deviation found in their respective testing measurements. Moreover, all ranges disclosed herein are to be understood to encompass any and all sub-ranges subsumed therein. For example, a range of “less than 10” can include any and all sub-ranges between (and including) the minimum value of zero and the maximum value of 10, that is, any and all sub-ranges having a minimum value of equal to or greater than zero and a maximum value of equal to or less than 10, e.g., 1 to 5. In certain cases, the numerical values as stated for the parameter can take on negative values. In this case, the example value of range stated as “less than 10” can assume values as defined earlier plus negative values, e.g. −1, −1.2, −1.89, −2, −2.5, −3, −10, −20, −30, etc.
Other embodiments of the disclosure will be apparent to those skilled in the art from consideration of the specification and practice of the disclosure disclosed herein. It is intended that the specification and examples be considered as exemplary only, with a true scope and spirit of the disclosure being indicated by the following claims.
The present disclosure was made with Government support under Contract No. FA9453-15-M-0425, awarded by the United States Air Force Research Laboratory. The U.S. Government has certain rights in the present disclosure.