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This paper looks into the technology classification problem for a distributed wireless spectrum sensing network. First, a new data-driven model for Automatic Modulation Classification (AMC) based on long short term memory (LSTM) is proposed. The model learns from the time domain amplitude and phase information of the modulation schemes present in the training data without requiring expert features like higher order cyclic moments. Analyses show that the proposed model yields an average classification accuracy of close to 90% at varying SNR conditions ranging from 0dB to 20dB. Further, we explore the utility of this LSTM model for a variable symbol rate scenario. We show that a LSTM based model can learn good representations of variable length time domain sequences, which is useful in classifying modulation signals with different symbol rates. The achieved accuracy of 75% on an input sample length of 64 for which it was not trained, substantiates the representation power of the model. To reduce the data communication overhead from distributed sensors, the feasibility of classification using averaged magnitude spectrum data, or online classification on the low cost sensors is studied. Furthermore, quantized realizations of the proposed models are analyzed for deployment on sensors with low processing power.
This paper presents end-to-end learning from spectrum data - an umbrella term for new sophisticated wireless signal identification approaches in spectrum monitoring applications based on deep neural networks. End-to-end learning allows to (i) automatically learn features directly from simple wireless signal representations, without requiring design of hand-crafted expert features like higher order cyclic moments, and (ii) train wireless signal classifiers in one end-to-end step which eliminates the need for complex multi-stage machine learning processing pipelines. The purpose of this article is to present the conceptual framework of end-to-end learning for spectrum monitoring and systematically introduce a generic methodology to easily design and implement wireless signal classifiers. Furthermore, we investigate the importance of the choice of wireless data representation to various spectrum monitoring tasks. In particular, two case studies are elaborated (i) modulation recognition and (ii) wireless technology interference detection. For each case study three convolutional neural networks are evaluated for the following wireless signal representations: temporal IQ data, the amplitude/phase representation and the frequency domain representation. From our analysis we prove that the wireless data representation impacts the accuracy depending on the specifics and similarities of the wireless signals that need to be differentiated, with different data representations resulting in accuracy variations of up to 29%. Experimental results show that using the amplitude/phase representation for recognizing modulation formats can lead to performance improvements up to 2% and 12% for medium to high SNR compared to IQ and frequency domain data, respectively. For the task of detecting interference, frequency domain representation outperformed amplitude/phase and IQ data representation up to 20%.
Existing communication systems exhibit inherent limitations in translating theory to practice when handling the complexity of optimization for emerging wireless applications with high degrees of freedom. Deep learning has a strong potential to overcome this challenge via data-driven solutions and improve the performance of wireless systems in utilizing limited spectrum resources. In this chapter, we first describe how deep learning is used to design an end-to-end communication system using autoencoders. This flexible design effectively captures channel impairments and optimizes transmitter and receiver operations jointly in single-antenna, multiple-antenna, and multiuser communications. Next, we present the benefits of deep learning in spectrum situation awareness ranging from channel modeling and estimation to signal detection and classification tasks. Deep learning improves the performance when the model-based methods fail. Finally, we discuss how deep learning applies to wireless communication security. In this context, adversarial machine learning provides novel means to launch and defend against wireless attacks. These applications demonstrate the power of deep learning in providing novel means to design, optimize, adapt, and secure wireless communications.
We designed and implemented a deep learning based RF signal classifier on the Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) of an embedded software-defined radio platform, DeepRadio, that classifies the signals received through the RF front end to different modulation types in real time and with low power. This classifier implementation successfully captures complex characteristics of wireless signals to serve critical applications in wireless security and communications systems such as identifying spoofing signals in signal authentication systems, detecting target emitters and jammers in electronic warfare (EW) applications, discriminating primary and secondary users in cognitive radio networks, interference hunting, and adaptive modulation. Empowered by low-power and low-latency embedded computing, the deep neural network runs directly on the FPGA fabric of DeepRadio, while maintaining classifier accuracy close to the software performance. We evaluated the performance when another SDR (USRP) transmits signals with different modulation types at different power levels and DeepRadio receives the signals and classifies them in real time on its FPGA. A smartphone with a mobile app is connected to DeepRadio to initiate the experiment and visualize the classification results. With real radio transmissions over the air, we show that the classifier implemented on DeepRadio achieves high accuracy with low latency (microsecond per sample) and low energy consumption (microJoule per sample), and this performance is not matched by other embedded platforms such as embedded graphics processing unit (GPU).
In this paper, we investigate cost-aware joint learning and optimization for multi-channel opportunistic spectrum access in a cognitive radio system. We investigate a discrete time model where the time axis is partitioned into frames. Each frame consists of a sensing phase, followed by a transmission phase. During the sensing phase, the user is able to sense a subset of channels sequentially before it decides to use one of them in the following transmission phase. We assume the channel states alternate between busy and idle according to independent Bernoulli random processes from frame to frame. To capture the inherent uncertainty in channel sensing, we assume the reward of each transmission when the channel is idle is a random variable. We also associate random costs with sensing and transmission actions. Our objective is to understand how the costs and reward of the actions would affect the optimal behavior of the user in both offline and online settings, and design the corresponding opportunistic spectrum access strategies to maximize the expected cumulative net reward (i.e., reward-minus-cost). We start with an offline setting where the statistics of the channel status, costs and reward are known beforehand. We show that the the optimal policy exhibits a recursive double threshold structure, and the user needs to compare the channel statistics with those thresholds sequentially in order to decide its actions. With such insights, we then study the online setting, where the statistical information of the channels, costs and reward are unknown a priori. We judiciously balance exploration and exploitation, and show that the cumulative regret scales in O(log T). We also establish a matched lower bound, which implies that our online algorithm is order-optimal. Simulation results corroborate our theoretical analysis.
This paper describes the principles and implementation results of reinforcement learning algorithms on IoT devices for radio collision mitigation in ISM unlicensed bands. Learning is here used to improve both the IoT network capability to support a larger number of objects as well as the autonomy of IoT devices. We first illustrate the efficiency of the proposed approach in a proof-of-concept based on USRP software radio platforms operating on real radio signals. It shows how collisions with other RF signals present in the ISM band are diminished for a given IoT device. Then we describe the first implementation of learning algorithms on LoRa devices operating in a real LoRaWAN network, that we named IoTligent. The proposed solution adds neither processing overhead so that it can be ran in the IoT devices, nor network overhead so that no change is required to LoRaWAN. Real life experiments have been done in a realistic LoRa network and they show that IoTligent device battery life can be extended by a factor 2 in the scenarios we faced during our experiment.