SenseNet: Deep Learning based Wideband spectrum sensing and modulation classification network

Next generation networks are expected to operate in licensed, shared as well as unlicensed spectrum to support spectrum demands of a wide variety of services.Due to shortage of radio spectrum, the need for communication systems(like cognitive radio) that can sense wideband spectrum and locate desired spectrum resources in real time has increased.Automatic modulation classifier (AMC) is an important part of wideband spectrum sensing (WSS) as it enables identification of incumbent users transmitting in the adjacent vacant spectrum.Most of the proposed AMC work on Nyquist samples which need to be further processed before they can be fed to the classifier.Working with Nyquist sampled signal demands high rate ADC and results in high power consumption and high sensing time which is unacceptable for next generation communication systems.To overcome this drawback we propose to use sub-nyquist sample based WSS and modulation classification. In this paper, we propose a novel architecture called SenseNet which combines the task of spectrum sensing and modulation classification into a single unified pipeline.The proposed method is endowed with the capability to perform blind WSS and modulation classification directly on raw sub-nyquist samples which reduces complexity and sensing time since no prior estimation of sparsity is required. We extensively compare the performance of our proposed method on WSS as well as modulation classification tasks for a wide range of modulation schemes, input datasets, and channel conditions.A significant drawback of using sub-nyquist samples is reduced performance compared to systems that employ nyquist sampled signal.However,we show that for the proposed method,the classification accuracy approaches to Nyquist sampling based deep learning AMC with an increase in signal to noise ratio.