Automatic classification of multi-carrier modulation signal using STFT spectrogram and deep CNN

Abstract

In the realm of communication systems, categorizing Multi-Carrier Modulation (MCM) signals without cooperative communication poses a significant technical challenge. In this paper, we introduce a novel approach for accurately categorizing five distinct MCM signals, including Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM), Filter Bank Multicarrier (FBMC), Filtered Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (FOFDM), Windowed Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (WOLA), and Universal Filtered Multicarrier (UFMC). Each signal is considered with two types of subcarrier waveforms, Quadrature Amplitude Modulation 16 (QAM16) and Quadrature Amplitude Modulation 64 (QAM64), resulting in a total of 10 unique MCM signals for classification. Our proposed methodology leverages Short-Time Fourier Transform (STFT) spectrograms for feature extraction at the frontend, while at the backend, we employ three variants of Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) models; CNN, CNN with Dropout (CNN_d), CNN with both Dropout and L1 Regularization (CNN_dL1) and one deep CNN model; Xception, individually. We aim to provide an efficient and reliable means of categorizing MCM signals, with practical applications in signal processing and communication systems. Extensive simulations demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach, achieving remarkable accuracies. Notably, the Xception model exhibits the highest accuracy among the four models considered. Specifically, we attain an accuracy of 98% at 10 dB SNR using the Xception model. These results underscore the efficacy of our proposed methodology and highlight the potential for its deployment in real-world scenarios.