Shilian Zheng

Xinjie Xu, Zhuangzhi Chen, Dongwei Xu et al.

With the rapid development of deep learning, automatic modulation recognition (AMR), as an important task in cognitive radio, has gradually transformed from traditional feature extraction and classification to automatic classification by deep learning technology. However, deep learning models are data-driven methods, which often require a large amount of data as the training support. Data augmentation, as the strategy of expanding dataset, can improve the generalization of the deep learning models and thus improve the accuracy of the models to a certain extent. In this paper, for AMR of radio signals, we propose a data augmentation strategy based on mixing signals and consider four specific methods (Random Mixing, Maximum-Similarity-Mixing, $θ-$Similarity Mixing and n-times Random Mixing) to achieve data augmentation. Experiments show that our proposed method can improve the classification accuracy of deep learning based AMR models in the full public dataset RML2016.10a. In particular, for the case of a single signal-to-noise ratio signal set, the classification accuracy can be significantly improved, which verifies the effectiveness of the methods.

Tao Chen, Shilian Zheng, Kunfeng Qiu et al.

The use of deep learning for radio modulation recognition has become prevalent in recent years. This approach automatically extracts high-dimensional features from large datasets, facilitating the accurate classification of modulation schemes. However, in real-world scenarios, it may not be feasible to gather sufficient training data in advance. Data augmentation is a method used to increase the diversity and quantity of training dataset and to reduce data sparsity and imbalance. In this paper, we propose data augmentation methods that involve replacing detail coefficients decomposed by discrete wavelet transform for reconstructing to generate new samples and expand the training set. Different generation methods are used to generate replacement sequences. Simulation results indicate that our proposed methods significantly outperform the other augmentation methods.

Jinyin Chen, Jie Ge, Shilian Zheng et al.

A wireless communications system usually consists of a transmitter which transmits the information and a receiver which recovers the original information from the received distorted signal. Deep learning (DL) has been used to improve the performance of the receiver in complicated channel environments and state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance has been achieved. However, its robustness has not been investigated. In order to evaluate the robustness of DL-based information recovery models under adversarial circumstances, we investigate adversarial attacks on the SOTA DL-based information recovery model, i.e., DeepReceiver. We formulate the problem as an optimization problem with power and peak-to-average power ratio (PAPR) constraints. We design different adversarial attack methods according to the adversary's knowledge of DeepReceiver's model and/or testing samples. Extensive experiments show that the DeepReceiver is vulnerable to the designed attack methods in all of the considered scenarios. Even in the scenario of both model and test sample restricted, the adversary can attack the DeepReceiver and increase its bit error rate (BER) above 10%. It can also be found that the DeepReceiver is vulnerable to adversarial perturbations even with very low power and limited PAPR. These results suggest that defense measures should be taken to enhance the robustness of DeepReceiver.

Tao Chen, Shilian Zheng, Jiawei Zhu et al.

In wireless communication systems, the asynchronization of the oscillators in the transmitter and the receiver along with the Doppler shift due to relative movement may lead to the presence of carrier frequency offset (CFO) in the received signals. Estimation of CFO is crucial for subsequent processing such as coherent demodulation. In this brief, we demonstrate the utilization of deep learning for CFO estimation by employing a residual network (ResNet) to learn and extract signal features from the raw in-phase (I) and quadrature (Q) components of the signals. We use multiple modulation schemes in the training set to make the trained model adaptable to multiple modulations or even new signals. In comparison to the commonly used traditional CFO estimation methods, our proposed IQ-ResNet method exhibits superior performance across various scenarios including different oversampling ratios, various signal lengths, and different channels

Tao Chen, Shilian Zheng, Jiepeng Chen et al.

Multi-antenna receiving systems have become a prevalent technical solution in communication systems. Meanwhile, deep learning has achieved significant progress in automatic modulation recognition tasks in single-antenna systems. However, the application of deep learning in multi-antenna modulation recognition (MAMR) tasks is still limited. In this paper, we propose an MAMR method namely MAMR-IQ to fully explore the diversity gain of a multi-antenna receiving system, which concatenates the raw received in-phase and quadrature (IQ) signals of multiple antennas and feeds them into a convolutional neural network. Simulation results show that the proposed MAMR-IQ method outperforms two existing deep learning-based MAMR methods which are based on direct voting (DV) and weight average (WA) in terms of both recognition accuracy and computational complexity. To address the problem of limited training data in few-shot scenarios, we further propose a data augmentation method that involves exchanging IQ sequences received by any two antennas to generate augmented samples. Simulation results show that with the proposed augmentation method, the recognition accuracy can be further improved.

Qi Xuan, Kunfeng Qiu, Jinchao Zhou et al.

Our digital world is full of time series and graphs which capture the various aspects of many complex systems. Traditionally, there are respective methods in processing these two different types of data, e.g., Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) and Graph Neural Network (GNN), while in recent years, time series could be mapped to graphs by using the techniques such as Visibility Graph (VG), so that researchers can use graph algorithms to mine the knowledge in time series. Such mapping methods establish a bridge between time series and graphs, and have high potential to facilitate the analysis of various real-world time series. However, the VG method and its variants are just based on fixed rules and thus lack of flexibility, largely limiting their application in reality. In this paper, we propose an Adaptive Visibility Graph (AVG) algorithm that can adaptively map time series into graphs, based on which we further establish an end-to-end classification framework AVGNet, by utilizing GNN model DiffPool as the classifier. We then adopt AVGNet for radio signal modulation classification which is an important task in the field of wireless communication. The simulations validate that AVGNet outperforms a series of advanced deep learning methods, achieving the state-of-the-art performance in this task.

Qi Xuan, Jinchao Zhou, Kunfeng Qiu et al.

Visibility Graph (VG) transforms time series into graphs, facilitating signal processing by advanced graph data mining algorithms. In this paper, based on the classic Limited Penetrable Visibility Graph (LPVG) method, we propose a novel nonlinear mapping method named Circular Limited Penetrable Visibility Graph (CLPVG). The testing on degree distribution and clustering coefficient on the generated graphs of typical time series validates that our CLPVG is able to effectively capture the important features of time series and has better anti-noise ability than traditional LPVG. The experiments on real-world time-series datasets of radio signal and electroencephalogram (EEG) also suggest that the structural features provided by CLPVG, rather than LPVG, are more useful for time-series classification, leading to higher accuracy. And this classification performance can be further enhanced through structural feature expansion by adopting Subgraph Networks (SGN). All of these results validate the effectiveness of our CLPVG model.

Zhuangzhi Chen, Hui Cui, Jingyang Xiang et al.

Deep learning methods achieve great success in many areas due to their powerful feature extraction capabilities and end-to-end training mechanism, and recently they are also introduced for radio signal modulation classification. In this paper, we propose a novel deep learning framework called SigNet, where a signal-to-matrix (S2M) operator is adopted to convert the original signal into a square matrix first and is co-trained with a follow-up CNN architecture for classification. This model is further accelerated by integrating 1D convolution operators, leading to the upgraded model SigNet2.0. The simulations on two signal datasets show that both SigNet and SigNet2.0 outperform a number of well-known baselines. More interestingly, our proposed models behave extremely well in small-sample learning when only a small training dataset is provided. They can achieve a relatively high accuracy even when 1\% training data are kept, while other baseline models may lose their effectiveness much more quickly as the datasets get smaller. Such result suggests that SigNet/SigNet2.0 could be extremely useful in the situations where labeled signal data are difficult to obtain. The visualization of the output features of our models demonstrates that our model can well divide different modulation types of signals in the feature hyper-space.

Shilian Zheng, Shichuan Chen, Peihan Qi et al.

Spectrum sensing is a key technology for cognitive radios. We present spectrum sensing as a classification problem and propose a sensing method based on deep learning classification. We normalize the received signal power to overcome the effects of noise power uncertainty. We train the model with as many types of signals as possible as well as noise data to enable the trained network model to adapt to untrained new signals. We also use transfer learning strategies to improve the performance for real-world signals. Extensive experiments are conducted to evaluate the performance of this method. The simulation results show that the proposed method performs better than two traditional spectrum sensing methods, i.e., maximum-minimum eigenvalue ratio-based method and frequency domain entropy-based method. In addition, the experimental results of the new untrained signal types show that our method can adapt to the detection of these new signals. Furthermore, the real-world signal detection experiment results show that the detection performance can be further improved by transfer learning. Finally, experiments under colored noise show that our proposed method has superior detection performance under colored noise, while the traditional methods have a significant performance degradation, which further validate the superiority of our method.

Shichuan Chen, Shilian Zheng, Lifeng Yang et al.

Radio signal classification has a very wide range of applications in the field of wireless communications and electromagnetic spectrum management. In recent years, deep learning has been used to solve the problem of radio signal classification and has achieved good results. However, the radio signal data currently used is very limited in scale. In order to verify the performance of the deep learning-based radio signal classification on real-world radio signal data, in this paper we conduct experiments on large-scale real-world ACARS and ADS-B signal data with sample sizes of 900,000 and 13,000,000, respectively, and with categories of 3,143 and 5,157 respectively. We use the same Inception-Residual neural network model structure for ACARS signal classification and ADS-B signal classification to verify the ability of a single basic deep neural network model structure to process different types of radio signals, i.e., communication bursts in ACARS and pulse bursts in ADS-B. We build an experimental system for radio signal deep learning experiments. Experimental results show that the signal classification accuracy of ACARS and ADS-B is 98.1% and 96.3%, respectively. When the signal-to-noise ratio (with injected additive white Gaussian noise) is greater than 9 dB, the classification accuracy is greater than 92%. These experimental results validate the ability of deep learning to classify large-scale real-world radio signals. The results of the transfer learning experiment show that the model trained on large-scale ADS-B datasets is more conducive to the learning and training of new tasks than the model trained on small-scale datasets.