Blind Source Separation of Intermittent Frequency Hopping Sources over LOS and NLOS Channels

This paper studies blind source separation (BSS) for frequency hopping (FH) sources. These radio frequency (RF) signals are observed by a uniform linear array (ULA) over (i) line-of-sight (LOS), (ii) single-cluster, and (iii) multiple-cluster Spatial Channel Model (SCM) settings. The sources are stationary, spatially sparse, and their activity is intermittent and assumed to follow a hidden Markov model (HMM). BSS is achieved by leveraging direction of arrival (DOA) information through an FH estimation stage, a DOA estimation stage, and a pairing stage with the latter associating FH patterns with physical sources via their estimated DOAs. Current methods in the literature do not perform the association of multiple frequency hops to the sources they are transmitted from. We bridge this gap by pairing the FH estimates with DOA estimates and labeling signals to their sources, irrespective of their hopped frequencies. A state filtering technique, referred to as hidden state filtering (HSF), is developed to refine DOA estimates for sources that follow a HMM. Numerical results demonstrate that the proposed approach is capable of separating multiple intermittent FH sources.