Low SNR BPSK signal chip rate estimation using a wavelet based spectral correlation algorithm

The spectral correlation function (SCF) is an efficient tool for analyzing the BPSK signal. In a low signal-to-noise (SNR) condition, however, spectral lines associated with the BPSK signal chip rate in SCF may be corrupted by the quadratic characteristics of the SCF. By use of the quadratic property of SCFs and narrow-band characteristics of the BPSK signal, this paper proposes a wavelet transform (WT) based SCF algorithm to detect and estimate the BPSK chip rate in a low SNR environment. Examples are illustrated to validate the proposed method.