Feature-Aided Main-Lobe Jamming Cancellation for Satellite Communication

Main-lobe jamming (MLJ) suppression presents a formidable challenge in morden satellite communication (SATCOM). In scenarios where the directions of arrival (DOAs) of the MLJ signal and the signal of interest (SOI) are either similar or identical, the commonly used spatial filtering techniques prove ineffective in suppressing MLJ signal while preserving the SOI. Given that the SOI is cooperative, we leverage cognitive prior feature information of the SOI to enhance its distinctiveness from the MLJ signal. Based on this, we propose a feature-aided MLJ suppression method using hopping coding (HC) modulation. By carefully designing a coded transmitted signal, we equivalently implement hopping in the spatial channel of the SOI. Subsequently, after reconstructing the received signal into the space-code joint domain, the MLJ suppression problem can be efficiently addressed using typical spatial filtering methods in higher dimensions. The mathematical principles behind the proposed method are first investigated to solve the MLJ suppression issue. Then a detailed feature-aided MLJ cancellation method is discussed. Theoretical analysis, along with numerical results obtained from simulations and experiments, are presented to validate that the proposed method surmounts the limitations of traditional spatial MLJ suppression methods. It successfully suppresses the jamming signal, particularly the self-protecting (SP) MLJ signal, while receiving the SOI with negligible attenuation.