Joint phase-recovery and demodulation-decoding of AIS signals received by satellite

International audienceThis paper presents a demodulation algorithm for automatic identification system (AIS) signals received by a satellite. The main contribution of this work is to consider the phase recovery problem for an unknown modulation index, coupled with a time-varying phase shift. The proposed method is based on a demodulator introduced in a previous paper based on a Viterbi-type algorithm applied to an extended trellis. The states of this extended trellis are composed of a trellis-code state and of a cyclic redundancy check state. The bit stuffing mechanism is taken into account by defining special conditional transitions in the extended trellis. This algorithm estimates and tracks the phase shift by modifying the Euclidean distance used in the trellis. Simulation results obtained with and without phase tracking are presented and compared in the context of the AIS system

Blind separation of complex-valued satellite-AIS data for marine surveillance: a spatial quadratic time-frequency domain approach

In this paper, the problem of the blind separation of complex-valued Satellite-AIS data for marine surveillance is addressed. Due to the specific properties of the sources under consideration: they are cyclo-stationary signals with two close cyclic frequencies, we opt for spatial quadratic time-frequency domain methods. The use of an additional diversity, the time delay, is aimed at making it possible to undo the mixing of signals at the multi-sensor receiver. The suggested method involves three main stages. First, the spatial generalized mean Ambiguity function of the observations across the array is constructed. Second, in the Ambiguity plane, Delay-Doppler regions of high magnitude are determined and Delay-Doppler points of peaky values are selected. Third, the mixing matrix is estimated from these Delay-Doppler regions using our proposed non-unitary joint zero-(block) diagonalization algorithms as to perform separation

Cyclic redundancy check-based detection algorithms for automatic identification system signals received by satellite.

This paper addresses the problem of demodulating signals transmitted in the automatic identification system. The main characteristics of such signals consist of two points: (i) they are modulated using a trellis-coded modulation, more precisely a Gaussian minimum shift keying modulation; and (ii) they are submitted to a bit stuffing procedure, which makes more difficult the detection of the transmitted information bits. This paper presents several demodulation algorithms developed in different contexts: mono-user and multi-user transmissions, and known/unknown phase shift. The proposed receiver uses the cyclic redundancy check (CRC) present in the automatic identification system signals for error correction and not for error detection only. By using this CRC, a particular Viterbi algorithm, on the basis of a so-called extended trellis, is developed. This trellis is defined by extended states composed of a trellis code state and a CRC state. Moreover, specific conditional transitions are defined to take into account the possible presence of stuffing bits. The algorithms proposed in the multi-user scenario present a small increase of computation complexity with respect to the mono-user algorithms. Some performance results are presented for several scenarios in the context of the automatic identification system and compared with those of existing techniques developed in similar scenarios