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Specialty Processing

TrellisWare offers several products for better characterizing RF environments. Typically referred to as situational awareness features, these processing products work “blindly” - without prior knowledge of the transmitted signals or details of the surrounding physical environments.

TrellisWare’s situational awareness solutions work where traditional methods fail – in bad multipath and dynamics, where significant interference exists, in low SNR and/or Doppler degradation, with short record lengths, and without specific information on timing or geometry.

TrellisWare offers several situational awareness products, including:

  • DF solutions – proven not only through analysis and simulation, but also in the real world
  • Blind modulation classifiers – determination of signal types present
  • Blind detection/acquisition processors for acquiring and even demodulating a signal without any knowledge of timing, frequency or dynamics

Direction Finding

TrellisWare has designed Direction Finding (DF) products for customer-identified signal types and our algorithms allow for the discrimination of more angles of arrival (AOA) than antennas used. The algorithms work from very short records of data or, equivalently, in very high noise environments. TrellisWare’s DF algorithms can derive multiple reflections of single signal sources even in very high multipath environments such as urban or enclosed areas and in the presence of substantial RF interference - conditions where typical DF approaches completely fail.

Blind Detection/Acquisition/Classification

TrellisWare’s situational awareness products can be used to test the RF environment in support of cognitive radio, detect and avoid (DAA), interference mitigation, or applications requiring location/direction of a signal relative to the receiver. They can also be used to map the location of signals in the immediate surroundings or better optimize a receiver’s performance based on other signals with which it must compete. In addition to using these algorithms in our own products, TrellisWare offers customized solutions for customer systems and applications as FPGA cores and/or software.

Key features of our SA Products

  • System-parameter agnostic (autonomously estimates signal BW, baud rate, synch, SNR)
  • Blind operation (non-data-aided)
  • Suited for high-order modulations (e.g., QAM)
  • Suited for challenging channels and short records
  • Symbol-stream demodulation a side benefit
  • Extendable to array reception
  • Demonstration with easy-to-use GUI

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TrellisWare's AOA estimation algorithms provide estimates that are right on top of the Cramer-Rao Lower Bound (CRLB), which is the lowest bound on the errors in estimation.

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TrellisWare's blind modulation classification works in the most challenging of environments with dynamics and multipath.

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TrellisWare's blind PSP is significantly more effective in reaching a target error rate.

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TrellisWare's AOA estimation algorithms provide estimates that are right on top of the Cramer-Rao Lower Bound (CRLB), which is the lowest bound on the errors in estimation. It only takes about 10 dB of SNR to reach this limit.

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TrellisWare's blind modulation classification works in the most challenging of environments with dynamics and multipath.Here, an unknown signal in a strong multipath channel is correctly identified as 32-cross modulation.

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TrellisWare's blind PSP is significantly more effective in reaching a target error rate. In this example, convergence happens within a few symbols, whereas Conventional Adaptive Maximum Likelihood Sequence Estimation (CAMLSE) requires a substantially higher number of symbols. In addition, the error floor is much lower with PSP than with CAMLSE.

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