Denoising Higher-order Moments for Blind Digital Modulation Identification in Multiple-antenna Systems

The paper proposes a new technique that substantially improves blind digital modulation identification (DMI) algorithms that are based on higher-order statistics (HOS). The proposed technique takes advantage of noise power estimation to make an offset on higher-order moments (HOM), thus getting an estimate of noise-free HOM. When tested for multiple-antenna systems, the proposed method outperforms other DMI algorithms, in terms of identification accuracy, that are based only on cumulants or do not consider HOM denoising, even for a receiver with impairments. The improvement is achieved with the same order of complexity of the common HOS-based DMI algorithms in the same context.