Automatic Modulation Recognition (AMR) is an essential part of Intelligent Transportation System (ITS) dynamic spectrum allocation. However, current deep learning-based AMR (DL-AMR) methods are challenged to extract discriminative and robust features at low signal-to-noise ratios (SNRs), where the representation of modulation symbols is highly interfered by noise. Furthermore, current research on GNN methods for AMR tasks generally suffers from issues related to graph structure construction and computational complexity. In this paper, we propose a Spatial-Temporal-Frequency Graph Convolution Network (STF-GCN) framework, with the temporal domain as the anchor point, to fuse spatial and frequency domain features embedded in the graph structure nodes. On this basis, an adaptive correlation-based adjacency matrix construction method is proposed, which significantly enhances the graph structure's capacity to aggregate local information into individual nodes. In addition, a PoolGAT layer is proposed to coarsen and compress the global key features of the graph, significantly reducing the computational complexity. The results of the experiments confirm that STF-GCN is able to achieve recognition performance far beyond the state-of-the-art DL-AMR algorithms, with overall accuracies of 64.35%, 66.04% and 70.95% on the RML2016.10a, RML2016.10b and RML22 datasets, respectively. Furthermore, the average recognition accuracies under low SNR conditions from -14dB to 0dB outperform the state-of-the-art (SOTA) models by 1.20%, 1.95% and 1.83%, respectively.
The growing complexity of radar signals demands responsive and accurate detection systems that can operate efficiently on resource-constrained edge devices. Existing models, while effective, often rely on substantial computational resources and large datasets, making them impractical for edge deployment. In this work, we propose an ultralight hybrid neural network optimized for edge applications, delivering robust performance across unfavorable signal-to-noise ratios (mean accuracy of 96.3% at 0 dB) using less than 100 samples per class, and significantly reducing computational overhead.
Automatic modulation recognition (AMR) critically contributes to spectrum sensing, dynamic spectrum access, and intelligent communications in cognitive radio systems. The introduction of deep learning has greatly improved the accuracy of AMR. However, current automatic identification methods require the input of key parameters such as the carrier frequency, which is necessary to convert the radio frequency (RF) to a base-band signal before it can be used for identification. In addition, the high complexity of deep learning models leads to high computational effort and long recognition times of existing methods, which are difficult to implement in demodulation system deployments. To address the above issues, in this paper, we first use power spectrum analysis to estimate the carrier frequency and signal bandwidth, which realizes the effective conversion from RF signals to base-band signals. This paper chooses the long short-term memory (LSTM) network as the model for automatic identification, which has low implementation complexity while maintaining high accuracy. Finally, by training the LSTM with actual sampling data combined with parameter estimation (PE), the method proposed in this paper can guarantee more than 90% format recognition accuracy.
Recently, deep learning technology has been successfully introduced into Automatic Modulation Recognition (AMR) tasks. However, the success of deep learning is all attributed to the training on large-scale datasets. Such a large amount of data brings huge pressure on storage, transmission and model training. In order to solve the problem of large amount of data, some researchers put forward the method of data distillation, which aims to compress large training data into smaller synthetic datasets to maintain its performance. While numerous data distillation techniques have been developed within the realm of image processing, the unique characteristics of signals set them apart. Signals exhibit distinct features across various domains, necessitating specialized approaches for their analysis and processing. To this end, a novel dataset distillation method--Multi-domain Distribution Matching (MDM) is proposed. MDM employs the Discrete Fourier Transform (DFT) to translate timedomain signals into the frequency domain, and then uses a model to compute distribution matching losses between the synthetic and real datasets, considering both the time and frequency domains. Ultimately, these two losses are integrated to update the synthetic dataset. We conduct extensive experiments on three AMR datasets. Experimental results show that, compared with baseline methods, our method achieves better performance under the same compression ratio. Furthermore, we conduct crossarchitecture generalization experiments on several models, and the experimental results show that our synthetic datasets can generalize well on other unseen models.
Automatic modulation recognition (AMR) is vital for accurately identifying modulation types within incoming signals, a critical task for optimizing operations within edge devices in IoT ecosystems. This paper presents an innovative approach that leverages Transformer networks, initially designed for natural language processing, to address the challenges of efficient AMR. Our transformer network architecture is designed with the mindset of real-time edge computing on IoT devices. Four tokenization techniques are proposed and explored for creating proper embeddings of RF signals, specifically focusing on overcoming the limitations related to the model size often encountered in IoT scenarios. Extensive experiments reveal that our proposed method outperformed advanced deep learning techniques, achieving the highest recognition accuracy. Notably, our model achieves an accuracy of 65.75 on the RML2016 and 65.80 on the CSPB.ML.2018+ dataset.
Automatic Modulation Recognition (AMR) plays a crucial role in wireless communication systems. Deep learning AMR strategies have achieved tremendous success in recent years. Modulated signals exhibit long temporal dependencies, and extracting global features is crucial in identifying modulation schemes. Traditionally, human experts analyze patterns in constellation diagrams to classify modulation schemes. Classical convolutional-based networks, due to their limited receptive fields, excel at extracting local features but struggle to capture global relationships. To address this limitation, we introduce a novel hybrid deep framework named TLDNN, which incorporates the architectures of the transformer and long short-term memory (LSTM). We utilize the self-attention mechanism of the transformer to model the global correlations in signal sequences while employing LSTM to enhance the capture of temporal dependencies. To mitigate the impact like RF fingerprint features and channel characteristics on model generalization, we propose data augmentation strategies known as segment substitution (SS) to enhance the model's robustness to modulation-related features. Experimental results on widely-used datasets demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance and exhibits significant advantages in terms of complexity. Our proposed framework serves as a foundational backbone that can be extended to different datasets. We have verified the effectiveness of our augmentation approach in enhancing the generalization of the models, particularly in few-shot scenarios. Code is available at \url{https://github.com/AMR-Master/TLDNN}.
With the rapid development of deep learning (DL) in recent years, automatic modulation recognition (AMR) with DL has achieved high accuracy. However, insufficient training signal data in complicated channel environments and large-scale DL models are critical factors that make DL methods difficult to deploy in practice. Aiming to these problems, we propose a novel neural network named convolution-linked signal transformer (ClST) and a novel knowledge distillation method named signal knowledge distillation (SKD). The ClST is accomplished through three primary modifications: a hierarchy of transformer containing convolution, a novel attention mechanism named parallel spatial-channel attention (PSCA) mechanism and a novel convolutional transformer block named convolution-transformer projection (CTP) to leverage a convolutional projection. The SKD is a knowledge distillation method to effectively reduce the parameters and complexity of neural networks. We train two lightweight neural networks using the SKD algorithm, KD-CNN and KD-MobileNet, to meet the demand that neural networks can be used on miniaturized devices. The simulation results demonstrate that the ClST outperforms advanced neural networks on all datasets. Moreover, both KD-CNN and KD-MobileNet obtain higher recognition accuracy with less network complexity, which is very beneficial for the deployment of AMR on miniaturized communication devices.
Automatic Modulation Recognition (AMR) is a crucial technology in the domains of radar and communications. Traditional AMR approaches assume a closed-set scenario, where unknown samples are forcibly misclassified into known classes, leading to serious consequences for situation awareness and threat assessment. To address this issue, Automatic Modulation Open-set Recognition (AMOSR) defines two tasks as Known Class Classification (KCC) and Unknown Class Identification (UCI). However, AMOSR faces core challenges in terms of inappropriate decision boundaries and sparse feature distributions. To overcome the aforementioned challenges, we propose a Class Information guided Reconstruction (CIR) framework, which leverages reconstruction losses to distinguish known and unknown classes. To enhance distinguishability, we design Class Conditional Vectors (CCVs) to match the latent representations extracted from input samples, achieving perfect reconstruction for known samples while yielding poor results for unknown ones. We also propose a Mutual Information (MI) loss function to ensure reliable matching, with upper and lower bounds of MI derived for tractable optimization and mathematical proofs provided. The mutually beneficial CCVs and MI facilitate the CIR attaining optimal UCI performance without compromising KCC accuracy, especially in scenarios with a higher proportion of unknown classes. Additionally, a denoising module is introduced before reconstruction, enabling the CIR to achieve a significant performance improvement at low SNRs. Experimental results on simulated and measured signals validate the effectiveness and the robustness of the proposed method.
Automatic modulation recognition (AMR) plays a vital role in modern communication systems. This letter proposes a novel three-stream deep learning framework to extract the features from individual and combined in-phase/quadrature (I/Q) symbols of the modulated data. The proposed framework integrates one-dimensional (1D) convolutional, two-dimensional (2D) convolutional and long short-term memory (LSTM) layers to extract features more effectively from a time and space perspective. Experiments on the benchmark dataset show the proposed framework has efficient convergence speed and achieves improved recognition accuracy, especially for the signals modulated by higher dimensional schemes such as 16 quadrature amplitude modulation (16-QAM) and 64-QAM.
Automatic modulation recognition (AMR) detects the modulation scheme of the received signals for further signal processing without needing prior information, and provides the essential function when such information is missing. Recent breakthroughs in deep learning (DL) have laid the foundation for developing high-performance DL-AMR approaches for communications systems. Comparing with traditional modulation detection methods, DL-AMR approaches have achieved promising performance including high recognition accuracy and low false alarms due to the strong feature extraction and classification abilities of deep neural networks. Despite the promising potential, DL-AMR approaches also bring concerns to complexity and explainability, which affect the practical deployment in wireless communications systems. This paper aims to present a review of the current DL-AMR research, with a focus on appropriate DL models and benchmark datasets. We further provide comprehensive experiments to compare the state of the art models for single-input-single-output (SISO) systems from both accuracy and complexity perspectives, and propose to apply DL-AMR in the new multiple-input-multiple-output (MIMO) scenario with precoding. Finally, existing challenges and possible future research directions are discussed.
Deep learning (DL) finds rich applications in the wireless domain to improve spectrum awareness. Typically, DL models are either randomly initialized following a statistical distribution or pretrained on tasks from other domains in the form of transfer learning without accounting for the unique characteristics of wireless signals. Self-supervised learning (SSL) enables the learning of useful representations from Radio Frequency (RF) signals themselves even when only limited training data samples with labels are available. We present a self-supervised RF signal representation learning method and apply it to the automatic modulation recognition (AMR) task by specifically formulating a set of transformations to capture the wireless signal characteristics. We show that the sample efficiency (the number of labeled samples needed to achieve a certain performance) of AMR can be significantly increased (almost an order of magnitude) by learning signal representations with SSL. This translates to substantial time and cost savings. Furthermore, SSL increases the model accuracy compared to the state-of-the-art DL methods and maintains high accuracy when limited training data is available.
Automatic modulation classification is of crucial importance in wireless communication networks. Deep learning based automatic modulation classification schemes have attracted extensive attention due to the superior accuracy. However, the data-driven method relies on a large amount of training samples and the classification accuracy is poor in the low signal-to-noise radio (SNR). In order to tackle these problems, a novel data-and-knowledge dual-driven automatic modulation classification scheme based on radio frequency machine learning is proposed by exploiting the attribute features of different modulations. The visual model is utilized to extract visual features. The attribute learning model is used to learn the attribute semantic representations. The transformation model is proposed to convert the attribute representation into the visual space. Extensive simulation results demonstrate that our proposed automatic modulation classification scheme can achieve better performance than the benchmark schemes in terms of the classification accuracy, especially in the low SNR. Moreover, the confusion among high-order modulations is reduced by using our proposed scheme compared with other traditional schemes.
With the rapid development of deep learning, automatic modulation recognition (AMR), as an important task in cognitive radio, has gradually transformed from traditional feature extraction and classification to automatic classification by deep learning technology. However, deep learning models are data-driven methods, which often require a large amount of data as the training support. Data augmentation, as the strategy of expanding dataset, can improve the generalization of the deep learning models and thus improve the accuracy of the models to a certain extent. In this paper, for AMR of radio signals, we propose a data augmentation strategy based on mixing signals and consider four specific methods (Random Mixing, Maximum-Similarity-Mixing, $\theta-$Similarity Mixing and n-times Random Mixing) to achieve data augmentation. Experiments show that our proposed method can improve the classification accuracy of deep learning based AMR models in the full public dataset RML2016.10a. In particular, for the case of a single signal-to-noise ratio signal set, the classification accuracy can be significantly improved, which verifies the effectiveness of the methods.
Recent learning-based image classification and speech recognition approaches make extensive use of attention mechanisms to achieve state-of-the-art recognition power, which demonstrates the effectiveness of attention mechanisms. Motivated by the fact that the frequency and time information of modulated radio signals are crucial for modulation mode recognition, this paper proposes a time-frequency attention mechanism for a convolutional neural network (CNN)-based modulation recognition framework. The proposed time-frequency attention module is designed to learn which channel, frequency and time information is more meaningful in CNN for modulation recognition. We analyze the effectiveness of the proposed time-frequency attention mechanism and compare the proposed method with two existing learning-based methods. Experiments on an open-source modulation recognition dataset show that the recognition performance of the proposed framework is better than those of the framework without time-frequency attention and existing learning-based methods.
Automatic modulation recognition (AMR) is a promising technology for intelligent communication receivers to detect signal modulation schemes. Recently, the emerging deep learning (DL) research has facilitated high-performance DL-AMR approaches. However, most DL-AMR models only focus on recognition accuracy, leading to huge model sizes and high computational complexity, while some lightweight and low-complexity models struggle to meet the accuracy requirements. This letter proposes an efficient DL-AMR model based on phase parameter estimation and transformation, with convolutional neural network (CNN) and gated recurrent unit (GRU) as the feature extraction layers, which can achieve high recognition accuracy equivalent to the existing state-of-the-art models but reduces more than a third of the volume of their parameters. Meanwhile, our model is more competitive in training time and test time than the benchmark models with similar recognition accuracy. Moreover, we further propose to compress our model by pruning, which maintains the recognition accuracy higher than 90% while has less than 1/8 of the number of parameters comparing with state-of-the-art models.
In communication systems, there are many tasks, like modulation recognition, which rely on Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) models. However, these models have been shown to be susceptible to adversarial perturbations, namely imperceptible additive noise crafted to induce misclassification. This raises questions about the security but also the general trust in model predictions. We propose to use adversarial training, which consists of fine-tuning the model with adversarial perturbations, to increase the robustness of automatic modulation recognition (AMC) models. We show that current state-of-the-art models benefit from adversarial training, which mitigates the robustness issues for some families of modulations. We use adversarial perturbations to visualize the features learned, and we found that in robust models the signal symbols are shifted towards the nearest classes in constellation space, like maximum likelihood methods. This confirms that robust models not only are more secure, but also more interpretable, building their decisions on signal statistics that are relevant to modulation recognition.
We present a neural network architecture able to efficiently detect modulation scheme in a portion of I/Q signals. This network is lighter by up to two orders of magnitude than other state-of-the-art architectures working on the same or similar tasks. Moreover, the number of parameters does not depend on the signal duration, which allows processing stream of data, and results in a signal-length invariant network. In addition, we have generated a dataset based on the simulation of impairments that the propagation channel and the demodulator can bring to recorded I/Q signals: random phase shifts, delays, roll-off, sampling rates, and frequency offsets. We benefit from this dataset to train our neural network to be invariant to impairments and quantify its accuracy at disentangling between modulations under realistic real-life conditions. Data and code to reproduce the results are made publicly available.
Nowadays, we mainly use various convolution neural network (CNN) structures to extract features from radio data or spectrogram in AMR. Based on expert experience and spectrograms, they not only increase the difficulty of preprocessing, but also consume a lot of memory. In order to directly use in-phase and quadrature (IQ) data obtained by the receiver and enhance the efficiency of network extraction features to improve the recognition rate of modulation mode, this paper proposes a new network structure called Fully Dense Neural Network (FDNN). This network uses residual blocks to extract features, dense connect to reduce model size, and adds attentions mechanism to recalibrate. Experiments on RML2016.10a show that this network has a higher recognition rate and lower model complexity. And it shows that the FDNN model with dense connections can not only extract features effectively but also greatly reduce model parameters, which also provides a significant contribution for the application of deep learning to the intelligent radio system.
Recent successes and advances in Deep Neural Networks (DNN) in machine vision and Natural Language Processing (NLP) have motivated their use in traditional signal processing and communications systems. In this paper, we present results of such applications to the problem of automatic modulation recognition. Variations in wireless communication channels are represented by statistical channel models and their parameterization will increase with the advent of 5G. In this paper, we report effect of simple two path channel model on our naive deep neural network based implementation. We also report impact of adversarial perturbation to the input signal.