Energy-Based RFI Detection: Theory and Results

For various sources of intentional or unintentional interference, radio frequency interference (RFI) is increasingly affecting many radio frequency operating systems. To mitigate RFI efficiently, it should, first, be detected robustly. On the other hand, energy detector (ED) is a very popular signal detector applied in various research sub-fields. On the contrary, it has not been deployed, to the best of our knowledge, for the detection of RFI to date. Accordingly, this paper investigates ED in the context of RFI detection and provides a theory for it. Monte-Carlo simulations corroborate that ED outperforms kurtosis detector (KD) even under the scenario that KD intercepts the received signal for a much longer interval. Furthermore, the performance of ED is assessed using real-world RFI contaminated data.