True-Power Measurement in Digital Communication Systems Affected by In-Channel Interference

A new cyclostationarity-based method for power measurement in digital communication systems in the presence of in-channel interference is proposed. The new method takes advantage of the signal-selective properties typical of algorithms based on cyclic spectral analysis. The true-power measure is achieved from the noisy data by estimating the cyclic spectrum of the desired signal at a cycle frequency not shared with noise and interference. The performance of the method is evaluated through several experiments on spread-spectrum and pulse-amplitude-modulated signals and with reference to different types of interfering signals. The method exhibits very good performance even when the desired and interfering signals completely overlap in both temporal and spectral domains.