Novel Deep-Learning Modulation Recognition Algorithm Using 2D Histograms over Wireless Communications Channels

Modulation recognition (MR) has become an essential topic in today’s wireless communications systems. Recently, convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have been employed as a potent tool for MR because of their ability to minimize the feature’s susceptibility to its surroundings and reduce the need for human feature extraction and evaluation. In particular, these investigations rely on the unrealistic assumption that the channel coefficient is typically one. This motivates us to overcome the previous constraint by providing a novel MR suited to fading wireless channels. This paper proposes a novel MR algorithm that is capable of recognizing a broad variety of modulation types, including M-ary QAM and M-ary PSK, without enforcing any restrictions on the modulation size, M. The analysis has shown that each modulation choice has a distinct two-dimensional in-phase quadrature histogram. This property is beneficially utilized to design a convolutional neural-network-based MR algorithm. When compared to the existing techniques, Monte Carlo simulations demonstrated the success of the proposed design.