Generalized Automatic Modulation Classification for OFDM Systems Under Unseen Synthetic Channels

Automatic modulation classification (AMC) is a crucial technique for the design of intelligent transceivers and has received considerable research attention. Conventional feature-based (FB) methods have the advantage of low computational complexity. However, these methods are highly sensitive to the distribution shifts of the received signal caused by the variation of channel effects and have rarely been studied in orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) systems under unseen synthetic channels with multipath fading effects, carrier frequency offset (CFO), phase offset (PO) and additive noise. To solve this problem, this paper proposes a novel FB method using the error vector magnitude (EVM) features for AMC tasks (termed as EVM-AMC), which can achieve reliable classification performance for the communication scenarios considering unseen synthetic channels in OFDM systems. Specifically, we first propose the axisymmetric mapping-based self-circulant differential division (AM-SCDD) algorithm to convert the received signal into the non-negative spectral quotient (NNSQ) sequence, deeply suppressing the synthetic channel effects. Subsequently, we derive the EVM features by analyzing the matched error vectors between the generated NNSQ sequence and the predefined NNSQ constellation symbol (NNSQCS) masks. During this process, a percentile-based filter is utilized to remove the outliers in each matched error vector. Finally, the feature samples collected from various channel conditions are sent to the multi-class support vector machine (SVM) classifiers for training and testing. Two candidate modulation type sets are employed to evaluate the performance of the proposed EVM-AMC method under both the constant and changing channel conditions. Our numerical results demonstrate that 1) the proposed method exhibits impressive robustness and generalization when dealing with unseen synthetic channels, 2) the proposed method yields the best classification performance when compared to the conventional FB AMC methods in the presence of channel effects.