Two-Channel Passive Detection of Cyclostationary Signals

This paper addresses a two-channel passive detection problem exploiting cyclostationarity. Given a reference channel (RC) and a surveillance channel (SC), the goal is to detect a target echo present at the surveillance array transmitted by an illuminator of opportunity equipped with multiple antennas. Since common transmission signals are cyclostationary, we exploit this information at the detector. Specifically, we derive an asymptotic generalized likelihood ratio test (GLRT) to detect the presence of a cyclostationary signal at the SC given observations from RC and SC. This detector tests for different covariance structures. Simulation results show good performance of the proposed detector compared to competing techniques that do not exploit cyclostationarity.