Automatic Modulation Recognition Based on Hybrid Neural Network

Abstract

Recognizing signals is critical for understanding the increasingly crowded wireless spectrum space in noncooperative communications. Traditional threshold or pattern recognition‐based solutions are labor‐intensive and error‐prone. Therefore, practitioners start to apply deep learning to automatic modulation classification (AMC). However, the recognition accuracy and robustness of recently presented neural network‐based proposals are still unsatisfactory, especially when the signal‐to‐noise ratio (SNR) is low. In this backdrop, this paper presents a hybrid neural network model, called MCBL, which combines convolutional neural network, bidirectional long‐short time memory, and attention mechanism to exploit their respective capability to extract the spatial, temporal, and salient features embedded in the signal samples. After formulating the AMC problem, the three modules of our hybrid dynamic neural network are detailed. To evaluate the performance of our proposal, 10 state‐of‐the‐art neural networks (including two latest models) are chosen as benchmarks for the comparison experiments conducted on an open radio frequency (RF) dataset. Results have shown that the recognition accuracy of MCBL can reach 93% which is the highest among the tested DNN models. At the same time, the computation efficiency and robustness of MCBL are better than existing proposals.