Phenomenology of signals degraded by phase noise
Roger Cutitta, Charles Dietlein · United States National Committee of URSI National Radio Science Meeting · 2018
This paper presents an overview of phase noise sources and propagation along with the impact component-level phase noise has on observable characteristics of radio frequency (RF) signals. Phase noise is typically a design parameter that is specified to meet RF system performance requirements. This paper describes how differences in component-level phase noise properties can degrade transmitted signals. Phase noise is a controllable characteristic only during the component and system design stage; its attributes typically cannot be changed after implementation. This implies that there is some amount of transmitter uniqueness due to component and system architecture, which can enable differentiation of transmitters that are intended to generate nominally identical waveforms. In this paper we demonstrate that multiple transmitters producing nominally identical signals can be discriminated based on their underlying component variations, via phase noise measurements of their transmitted signals.