Intelligent Sorting Algorithm for Multi-station Radar Signals Based on Federated Learning

YE Chengji; XIE Jian; ZHANG Zhaolin; WANG Ling

doi:10.11999/JEIT251355

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YE Chengji, XIE Jian, ZHANG Zhaolin, WANG Ling. Intelligent Sorting Algorithm for Multi-station Radar Signals Based on Federated Learning[J]. Journal of Electronics & Information Technology. doi: 10.11999/JEIT251355

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YE Chengji, XIE Jian, ZHANG Zhaolin, WANG Ling. Intelligent Sorting Algorithm for Multi-station Radar Signals Based on Federated Learning[J]. Journal of Electronics & Information Technology. doi: 10.11999/JEIT251355

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Intelligent Sorting Algorithm for Multi-station Radar Signals Based on Federated Learning

doi: 10.11999/JEIT251355 cstr: 32379.14.JEIT251355

School of Electronics and Information, Northwestern Polytechnical University, Xi’an 710072, China

Funds: The National Natural Science Foundation of China(62571444, 62271412)

Received Date: 2025-12-23
Accepted Date: 2026-03-03
Rev Recd Date: 2026-03-03

Available Online: 2026-03-14

Abstract

Abstract

Objective Radar signal sorting is a critical step in electronic reconnaissance and battlefield situational awareness. It is used to accurately separate interleaved pulse streams in complex electromagnetic environments. Although multi-station cooperative reconnaissance systems provide spatial diversity gains that can mitigate the parameter ambiguity and aliasing problems of single-station systems, their practical deployment faces major challenges. Traditional centralized processing architectures require massive volumes of raw Pulse Description Word (PDW) data to be transmitted to a central server. This requirement leads to prohibitive communication bandwidth costs and increases the risk of leakage of sensitive electromagnetic spectrum intelligence. In addition, because stations are geographically distributed and differ in antenna scanning patterns, the data collected at different stations often show significant Non-Independent and Identically Distributed (Non-IID) characteristics. Such heterogeneity reduces the generalization ability of local models trained on isolated data islands. To resolve the conflict between data isolation and the need for collaborative intelligence, a multi-station collaborative radar signal sorting method is proposed based on a Federated Learning (FL) framework. Collaborative model training is enabled without exchange of raw data, so that data privacy is preserved, communication overhead is reduced, and sorting robustness is improved in heterogeneous and noisy battlefield environments. Methods A centralized federated sorting framework is constructed to coordinate multiple reconnaissance stations. The method contains three main components: feature preprocessing, a lightweight local temporal model, and a heterogeneity-aware aggregation strategy. First, in data preprocessing, the raw PDW parameters, including TOA, CF, and PW, are normalized to address substantial differences in scale. Specifically, TOA is transformed into first-order differential values to extract Pulse Repetition Interval (PRI) information, which prevents numerical saturation and captures periodic patterns effectively (Fig. 3). Second, a local time-series sorting model is designed for the resource constraints of edge devices. A bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) network is used as the backbone to capture long-range dependencies and dynamic patterns in pulse sequences from both forward and backward directions. To accelerate convergence and prevent gradient vanishing, residual connections are added to fuse static and dynamic features. The extracted features are then mapped to the radiation source category space through a cascaded linear classification layer. Third, to address model drift caused by Non-IID data, including feature distribution shift and label distribution shift, a new aggregation strategy is proposed based on parameter decomposition and proximal regularization. Model parameters are decoupled into a feature extractor and a classifier. During federated aggregation, only the parameters of the generic feature extractor are uploaded and globally averaged, whereas the personalized classifier parameters are retained locally to adapt to the class distribution of each station. Furthermore, a proximal regularization term is added to the local loss function (Eq. 20). This constraint limits the deviation of local updates from the global model and ensures that the optimization direction does not diverge substantially because of local data heterogeneity, thereby improving the stability and convergence speed of the global model. Results and Discussions Extensive simulation experiments are conducted on core datasets with 3 stations and 5 radars, and on extended datasets with 9 stations and 12 radars, including complex modulation patterns such as jitter, sliding, and staggering. Quantitative analysis shows that the proposed method achieves sorting performance comparable to that of Centralized Learning (CL). On the core dataset, the Precision, Recall, and F1-score of the proposed method reach 96.51%, 96.35%, and 96.42%, respectively, exceeding those of FedAvg by approximately 0.67% in F1-score. On the more challenging extended dataset, the performance advantage becomes more significant, with an F1-score improvement of 3.86% over FedAvg (Table 4). These results indicate that the parameter decomposition strategy effectively balances common feature learning with personalized decision-making. Analysis by class further shows that, for categories that are difficult to distinguish, such as Radar 7 and Radar 10, the proposed method improves recognition accuracy by up to 15% and 6%, respectively, compared with FedAvg (Fig. 7 and Fig. 8). Robustness tests further demonstrate the adaptability of the method. When the number of participating stations increases from 3 to 9 (Fig. 9), the F1-score rises steadily from 73.53% to 83.75%. This result confirms that enlarging node scale in the FL framework produces collaborative gains through more diverse samples and reduced geographic statistical heterogeneity, which substantially improve model generalization and robustness. Under severe class skew conditions, the method maintains an F1-score above 80% on the core dataset (Fig. 10 and Fig. 11). Furthermore, under extreme electromagnetic conditions characterized by high pulse loss rates of 70% and spurious pulse rates of 70%, the model maintains sorting performance above 75%, which demonstrates strong robustness against noise and interference (Fig. 12). Conclusions An FL-based framework is proposed for multi-station collaborative radar signal sorting to address data privacy and transmission constraints in distributed reconnaissance. By integrating a lightweight LSTM with a heterogeneity-aware aggregation mechanism, the method effectively captures temporal pulse features and mitigates model drift caused by Non-IID data. Experimental results verify that the approach achieves accuracy comparable to that of centralized methods and shows superior robustness under label skew and severe data degradation, including high pulse loss and spurious pulse rates. This study provides a privacy-preserving and efficient solution for intelligent signal processing in distributed electronic warfare systems.
- Radar signal sorting,
- Multi-station collaboration,
- Federated learning

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References(16)

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