Blind signal parameter estimation for the Rapid Radio framework

There are many instances where it is desirable or even essential to rapidly build a functional radio receiver to recover symbols from an unknown modulated source. The term ¿rapid radio¿ refers to a demonstrable analysis environment and receiver implementation methodology for rapid deployment. An automated tool for signal analysis requires several stages for the estimation and classification of the RF signal parameters and modulation type. To fulfill the requirements of the first stage in the case of single carrier linear modulations, an estimator of the symbol rate, frequency offset, and roll-off factor based in frequency-domain analysis is proposed. An estimate of the SNR is obtained as a by-product of the method. The technique was validated with experiments over-the-air.