The Fast and Reliable Detection of Multiple Narrowband FH Signals: A Practical Framework

Frequency hopping (FH) is a well-known technique that is commonly used in communication systems owing to its many advantages, including its strong anti-jamming capability. In this technique, basically, radio signals are transmitted by switching the carrier between different frequency channels. As a result, the FH signal is not stationary; hence, its spectrum is expected to change over time. Therefore, the task of detection and parameter estimation of FH signals is very challenging in practice. To address this challenge, the study presented in this article proposes a method that detects and estimates the parameters of multiple narrowband FH signals. In the proposed method, first, short-time Fourier transform (STFT) is utilized to analyze FH signals, and a practical binarization process based on thresholding is used to detect FH signals. Then, a new algorithm is proposed to ensure that the center frequencies of the detected signals are successfully separated. Next, another algorithm is proposed to estimate the parameters of the detected signals. After estimating the parameters for the entire spectrum, an approach is used to detect FH signals. Lastly, the hop-clustering process is applied to separate the hops into groups without time overlap. The simulation results show that the proposed method can be an efficient way for the fast and accurate parameter estimation and detection of multiple narrowband FH signals.