Robust technique for estimating the bearings of cyclostationary signals

This paper deals with the problem of direction finding using cyclostationary signals in the presence of cycle frequency error (CFE). By exploiting the signal cyclostationarity, cyclic MUSIC and conjugate cyclic MUSIC presented in Gardner (Cyclostationarity in Communications and Signal Processing, New York, 1994; Proc. IEEE 76 (1988) 845) have been shown to be effective for signal-selective direction finding. However, they suffer from severe performance degradation even if there is a small error in the cycle frequency of the signals of interest. In this paper, we first evaluate the performance of conjugate cyclic MUSIC when CFE exists. An analytical formula is derived to show the behavior of the performance degradation due to CFE. By exploiting the eigenstructure of the conjugate cyclic correlation matrix of the received array data, we develop a technique including a method for estimating the cycle frequency of the SOI and an efficient method in conjunction with a subspace-fitting algorithm to achieve robust direction finding against CFE. Several simulation examples confirming the theoretical analysis and showing the effectiveness of the proposed technique are also presented.