SigChord: Sniffing Wide Non-sparse Multiband Signals for Terrestrial and Non-terrestrial Wireless Networks

Abstract

While unencrypted information inspection in physical layer (e.g., open headers) can provide deep insights for optimizing wireless networks, the state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods heavily depend on full sampling rate (a.k.a Nyquist rate), and high-cost radios, due to terrestrial and non-terrestrial networks densely occupying multiple bands across large bandwidth (e.g., from 4G/5G at 0.4-7 GHz to LEO satellite at 4-40 GHz). To this end, we present SigChord, an efficient physical layer inspection system built on low-cost and sub-Nyquist sampling radios. We first design a deep and rule-based interleaving algorithm based on Transformer network to perform spectrum sensing and signal recovery under sub-Nyquist sampling rate, and second, cascade protocol identifier and decoder based on Transformer neural networks to help physical layer packets analysis. We implement SigChord using software-defined radio platforms, and extensively evaluate it on over-the-air terrestrial and non-terrestrial wireless signals. The experiments demonstrate that SigChord delivers over 99% accuracy in detecting and decoding, while still decreasing 34% sampling rate, compared with the SOTA approaches.