Artificial Neural Network based Automatic Modulation Classification over a Software Defined Radio Testbed

Automatic modulation classification (AMC) is an essential component of several intelligent communication systems. In this paper, we design and evaluate a practical AMC system that can be readily deployed to provide robust performance in various real-time commercial scenarios. Thus, our main goal is to develop a robust AMC algorithm with low computational complexity for easy implementation and practical deployment. To this end, we utilize recently revitalized machine learning based approaches used for various classification purposes. In our proposed AMC architecture, we first propose various statistics that serve as features of the AMC signals; next, we design an artificial neural network (ANN) based classifier that performs AMC over a wide range of SNRs. We employ Nesterov accelerated adaptive moment (NADAM) estimation technique to improve the classification performance of our ANN. Further, to establish the practical feasibility of our proposed architecture, we implement it on a SDR testbed. The proposed ANN-based classifier is shown to outperforms the hybrid hierarchical AMC (HH-AMC) [1] system and is flexible enough to easily expand the dictionary of modulation formats for other applications.