Preamble-Referenced Cyclic Cross-Correlation Chirp Spread Spectrum Communication Technology in Complex Multipath Environments

YE Yun; ZHANG Chengyu; PANG Haodong; MA Wenfeng; LI Xuejiao; ZHANG Xiaokai

doi:10.11999/JEIT260702

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YE Yun, ZHANG Chengyu, PANG Haodong, MA Wenfeng, LI Xuejiao, ZHANG Xiaokai. Preamble-Referenced Cyclic Cross-Correlation Chirp Spread Spectrum Communication Technology in Complex Multipath Environments[J]. Journal of Electronics & Information Technology. doi: 10.11999/JEIT260702

Citation:

YE Yun, ZHANG Chengyu, PANG Haodong, MA Wenfeng, LI Xuejiao, ZHANG Xiaokai. Preamble-Referenced Cyclic Cross-Correlation Chirp Spread Spectrum Communication Technology in Complex Multipath Environments[J]. Journal of Electronics & Information Technology. doi: 10.11999/JEIT260702

Citation:

YE Yun, ZHANG Chengyu, PANG Haodong, MA Wenfeng, LI Xuejiao, ZHANG Xiaokai. Preamble-Referenced Cyclic Cross-Correlation Chirp Spread Spectrum Communication Technology in Complex Multipath Environments[J]. Journal of Electronics & Information Technology. doi: 10.11999/JEIT260702

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Preamble-Referenced Cyclic Cross-Correlation Chirp Spread Spectrum Communication Technology in Complex Multipath Environments

doi: 10.11999/JEIT260702 cstr: 32379.14.JEIT260702

1.
Army Engineering of PLA, Nanjing 210007, Jiangsu, China
2.
Unit 31605 of PLA, Nanjing 211100, Jiangsu, China

Funds: National Natural Science Foundation of China 6240013161, Natural Science Foundation of Jiangsu Province BK20241601

Accepted Date: 2026-08-24
Rev Recd Date: 2026-08-24

Available Online: 2026-08-28

Abstract

Abstract

Objective Ground unmanned platforms operating in urban streets, industrial parks, and underground passages require short-burst reliable command-and-control communication. These complex near-ground environments simultaneously impose strong multipath fading, large Carrier Frequency Offset (CFO), residual Timing Offset (TO), Sampling Frequency Offset (SFO), and in-band interference from coexisting wireless systems. Conventional Chirp Spread Spectrum (CSS) receivers based on single-peak decisions in the dechirp–Discrete Fourier Transform (DFT) domain suffer from multipath-induced spectral splitting and interference-induced bin masking, while Direct-Sequence Spread Spectrum (DSSS) baselines exhibit synchronization fragility under combined offsets and degraded energy efficiency under multipath. Simultaneously addressing these impairments is essential for enabling robust low-latency control links and for the coexistence of unmanned platforms with legacy wireless infrastructure in dense deployments. Methods This paper proposes a Preamble-Referenced Cyclic Cross-Correlation CSS (PRCC-CSS) scheme that jointly designs frame structure, synchronization estimation, and payload detection. Each frame comprises multiple identical up-chirp preamble symbols, a down-chirp Start Frame Delimiter (SFD), and CSS-modulated payload symbols. The complementary frequency-domain indices at the dechirp-DFT outputs of the up-chirp preamble and the down-chirp SFD are exploited to jointly estimate integer CFO and TO via closed-form linear combinations. Fractional CFO is recovered from inter-symbol phase differences across adjacent preamble symbols; fractional TO is extracted from the centroid of the main-peak neighborhood of the averaged preamble spectrum; and under a common oscillator-reference assumption, SFO-induced bin drift is compensated using the CFO-derived clock-offset relation. After offset compensation, the averaged preamble spectrum serves as a frame-specific reference spectrum that captures the instantaneous multipath fingerprint of the channel. Payload symbols are then detected by computing the cyclic cross-correlation between this reference spectrum and each candidate-shifted payload spectrum, taking the maximum-correlation index as the demodulated symbol. This formulation converts the multipath-induced frequency-domain structure from an adverse perturbation into a matchable intra-frame reference feature, thereby enabling multipath-robust structure-matched payload detection without explicit path-by-path channel estimation. Results and Discussions PRCC-CSS is evaluated under identical bandwidth, sampling rate, and processing gain at a target Bit Error Rate (BER) of 10^–4. First, it is compared against three DSSS baselines using Binary Phase-Shift Keying (BPSK), Quadrature Phase-Shift Keying (QPSK), and 16-ary Quadrature Amplitude Modulation (16QAM) under three channel conditions. Under Additive White Gaussian Noise (AWGN, Fig. 1), PRCC-CSS reaches the target at approximately 5 dB Eb/N0 versus 8.5–9 dB for the best DSSS baseline, indicating that chirp index modulation combined with preamble-referenced correlation provides inherent frequency-domain energy aggregation independent of any specific multipath profile. Under the Extended Typical Urban (ETU) channel without interference (Fig. 2), PRCC-CSS requires approximately 6.5 dB versus approximately 10 dB, as the preamble reference spectrum captures and reuses the per-frame multipath structure that finite-finger DSSS-RAKE cannot fully exploit due to path-capture and code-synchronization errors. Under ETU with in-band interference at Jamming-to-Signal Ratio (JSR) = 5 dB (Fig. 3), PRCC-CSS requires approximately 8.1 dB versus 10.8–11.0 dB, since the cyclic cross-correlation preserves decision separability—reference and payload spectra share nearly identical channel structure within the same frame—whereas DSSS-RAKE accumulates interference residue across all combining fingers. Second, against Dechirp Non-Coherent (DNC) and coherent peak detection at Spreading Factor (SF) = 7 and SF = 9 under ETU with interference (Fig. 4), DNC fails to reach the target within the tested Signal-to-Interference-plus-Noise Ratio (SINR) range at SF = 7 and requires approximately 4–5 dB at SF = 9, whereas PRCC-CSS reaches the target at approximately –5 dB SINR at SF = 7 and –11 dB at SF = 9, yielding a 10–15 dB SINR threshold improvement and confirming that the gain stems from frame-wide cyclic matching rather than phase compensation alone. Third, a Software-Defined Radio (SDR) prototype on an ETU-emulated channel at JSR = 5 dB (Fig. 5–Fig. 6) retains 300 of 332 received frames as reliable (90.4%). In the retained reliable frames, no symbol errors were observed among 6,000 payload symbols and no bit errors were observed among 54,000 payload bits, corresponding to a one-sided 95% upper confidence bound of 5.56 × 10^-⁵ on the retained-frame conditional BER. Conclusions This paper proposes the PRCC-CSS scheme that jointly integrates integer/fractional CFO–TO and SFO estimation with cyclic cross-correlation payload detection. Results demonstrate that: (1) at BER = 10^–4, PRCC-CSS lowers the required Eb/N0 by approximately 2.7–4.0 dB relative to the best DSSS-BPSK/QPSK/16QAM baseline across AWGN, ETU, and ETU with JSR = 5 dB cases; (2) under ETU with interference, PRCC-CSS lowers the required SINR by approximately 10–15 dB relative to DNC at SF = 7 and SF = 9, with a further consistent margin over coherent peak detection; (3) the SDR prototype retains 90.4% of received frames, and the retained-frame conditional BER has a one-sided 95% upper confidence bound of 5.56 × 10^–5. By exploiting the multipath-induced frequency-domain structure as a matchable intra-frame reference feature rather than as a perturbation, PRCC-CSS provides a candidate physical-layer solution for short-burst reliable communication in complex near-ground environments. Future work will extend the scheme to higher-order CSS modulations, multi-antenna diversity reception, and adaptive reference-spectrum updating for time-varying channels.
- Chirp Spread Spectrum (CSS),
- Short-burst communication,
- Synchronization estimation,
- Cyclic cross-correlation,
- Multipath-robust detection,
- Ground unmanned platform

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References(18)

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