Modulation Classification for MIMO-OFDM Signals via Approximate Bayesian Inference

The problem of modulation classification for a multiple-antenna (MIMO) system employing orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) is investigated under the assumption of unknown frequency-selective fading channels and signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). The classification problem is formulated as a Bayesian inference task, and solutions are proposed based on Gibbs sampling and mean field variational inference. The proposed methods rely on a selection of the prior distributions that adopts a latent Dirichlet model for the modulation type and on the Bayesian network formalism. The Gibbs sampling method converges to the optimal Bayesian solution and, using numerical results, its accuracy is seen to improve for small sample sizes when switching to the mean field variational inference technique after a number of iterations. The speed of convergence is shown to improve via annealing and random restarts. While most of the literature on modulation classification assume that the channels are flat fading, that the number of receive antennas is no less than that of transmit antennas, and that a large number of observed data symbols are available, the proposed methods perform well under more general conditions. Finally, the proposed Bayesian methods are demonstrated to improve over existing non-Bayesian approaches based on independent component analysis and on prior Bayesian methods based on the `superconstellation' method.Comment: To be appear in IEEE Trans. Veh. Technolog

Automatic Identification of Space-Time Block Coding for MIMO-OFDM Systems in the Presence of Impulsive Interference

Signal identification, a vital task of intelligent communication radios, finds its applications in various military and civil communication systems. Previous works on identification for space-time block codes (STBC) of multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) system employing orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) are limited to additive white Gaussian noise. In this paper, we develop a novel automatic identification algorithm to exploit the generalized cross-correntropy function of the received signals to classify STBC-OFDM signals in the presence of Gaussian noise and impulsive interference. This algorithm first introduces the generalized cross-correntropy function to fully utilize the space-time redundancy of STBC-OFDM signals. The strongly-distinguishable discriminating matrix is then constructed by using the generalized cross-correntropy for multiple receive antennas. Finally, a decision tree identification algorithm is employed to identify the STBC-OFDM signals which is extended by the binary hypothesis test. The proposed algorithm avoids the traditionally required pre-processing tasks, such as channel coefficient estimation, noise and interference statistics prediction and modulation type recognition. Numerical results are presented to show that the proposed scheme provides good identification performance by exploiting the generalized cross-correntropy function of STBC-OFDM signals under impulsive interference circumstances

A Survey of Blind Modulation Classification Techniques for OFDM Signals

Blind modulation classification (MC) is an integral part of designing an adaptive or intelligent transceiver for future wireless communications. Blind MC has several applications in the adaptive and automated systems of sixth generation (6G) communications to improve spectral efficiency and power efficiency, and reduce latency. It will become a integral part of intelligent software-defined radios (SDR) for future communication. In this paper, we provide various MC techniques for orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) signals in a systematic way. We focus on the most widely used statistical and machine learning (ML) models and emphasize their advantages and limitations. The statistical-based blind MC includes likelihood-based (LB), maximum a posteriori (MAP) and feature-based methods (FB). The ML-based automated MC includes k-nearest neighbors (KNN), support vector machine (SVM), decision trees (DTs), convolutional neural networks (CNNs), recurrent neural networks (RNNs), and long short-term memory (LSTM) based MC methods. This survey will help the reader to understand the main characteristics of each technique, their advantages and disadvantages. We have also simulated some primary methods, i.e., statistical- and ML-based algorithms, under various constraints, which allows a fair comparison among different methodologies. The overall system performance in terms bit error rate (BER) in the presence of MC is also provided. We also provide a survey of some practical experiment works carried out through National Instrument hardware over an indoor propagation environment. In the end, open problems and possible directions for blind MC research are briefly discussed