Automatic Modulation Recognition Using Wavelet Transform and Neural Networks in Wireless Systems

Modulation type is one of the most important characteristics used in signal waveform identification. In this paper, an algorithm for automatic digital modulation recognition is proposed. The proposed algorithm is verified using higher-order statistical moments (HOM) of continuous wavelet transform (CWT) as a features set. A multilayer feed-forward neural network trained with resilient backpropagation learning algorithm is proposed as a classifier. The purpose is to discriminate among different M-ary shift keying modulation schemes and the modulation order without any priori signal information. Pre-processing and features subset selection using principal component analysis is used to reduce the network complexity and to improve the classifier's performance. The proposed algorithm is evaluated through confusion matrix and false recognition probability. The proposed classifier is shown to be capable of recognizing the modulation scheme with high accuracy over wide signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) range over both additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) and different fading channels.