3D convolutional neural networks based automatic modulation classification in the presence of channel noise

Automatic modulation classification is a task that is essentially required in many intelligent communication systems such as fibre-optic, next-generation 5G or 6G systems, cognitive radio as well as multimedia internet-of-things networks etc. Deep learning (DL) is a representation learning method that takes raw data and finds representations for different tasks such as classification and detection. DL techniques like Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) have a strong potential to process and analyse large chunks of data. In this work, we considered the problem of multiclass (eight classes) classification of modulated signals, which are, Binary Phase Shift Keying, Quadrature Phase Shift Keying, 16 and 64 Quadrature Amplitude Modulation corrupted by Additive White Gaussian Noise, Rician and Rayleigh fading channels using 3D-CNN architectures in both frequency and spatial domains while deploying three approaches for data augmentation, which are, random zoomed in/out, random shift and random weak Gaussian blurring augmentation techniques with a cross-validation (CV) based hyperparameter selection statistical approach. Simulation results testify the performance of 10-fold CV without augmentation in the spatial domain to be the best while the worst performing method happens to be 10-fold CV without augmentation in the frequency domain and we found learning in the spatial domain to be better than learning in the frequency domain.