High-fidelity Symbol Synchronization for Specific Emitter Identification

Specific emitter identification (SEI) provides the capability to distinguish radio emitters with the external features carried by the received waveforms. Since the differences between emitters are very subtle, the fidelity of signal processing may affect the identification accuracy. In this paper, we propose a high-fidelity symbol synchronization approach to depress the processing errors introduced by demodulation. First, two existing problems of timing recovery are pointed out in SEI scenario. Thereafter, we present a window-based interpolator and a feedforward decision-directed timing estimator to address these problems. Simulation results show that our approach effectively depresses the processing errors compared with the existing methods. Furthermore, it achieves a better performance of SEI.