A New Instrument Based on Cyclic Spectral Analysis for Power Measurement in Digital Telecommunication Systems

A digital signal processor-based instrument for power measurement on digital telecommunication signals is dealt with. It enlists a special hardware architecture, made up of a core digital signal processor connected to a data acquisition board, and takes advantage of a measurement approach based on cyclic spectral analysis, already proposed by the authors. Thanks to an efficient measurement process and an optimized implementation of its fundamental stages, the proposed instrument succeeds in measuring the power level of a desired signal also when it completely overlaps both in time and frequency domains with an interfering signal. In particular, the instrument has exhibited very good performance even when desired and interfering signals are modulated according to the same technique, and share either the carrier frequency or the symbol rate.