A technique for instantaneous tracking of frequency agile signals in the presence of spectrally correlated interference

A single-sensor technique for detecting and tracking frequency agile signals in the presence of spectrally correlated or second-order cyclostationary noise and cochannel interference is presented. The technique is developed from the maximum-likelihood estimate of the spectral frequency of a frequency agile signal received in complex Gaussian interference with unknown spectral correlation, and is implemented using a frequency-channelized least-mean-square adaptive processing algorithm. The resulting algorithm can significantly outperform conventional frequency-channelized whitener/detector approaches when tracking agile signals corrupted by spectrally correlated interference, by using the correlation between spectrally separated interference components to reduce the interference content in each spectral bin prior to the whitening/detection operation. These results are demonstrated via computer simulation