Dyadic Aggregated Autoregressive Model (DASAR) for Automatic Modulation Classification

In this article, we presented a novel spectral estimation method, the dyadic aggregated autoregressive model (DASAR), that characterizes the spectrum dynamics of a modulated signal. DASAR enhances automatic modulation classification (AMC) on environments where new or unknown modulation techniques are introduced, and only size-restricted data is accessible to train classification algorithms. A key component for obtaining efficient machine learning-based classification is the development of valuable knowledge-descriptive features. DASAR constructs a multi-level spectral representation by subdividing a signal into successive dyadic segments where each partition is modeled as an aggregation of single-frequency autoregressive processes. Thus, the model ensures a robust representation at the segment level, while the multi-level decomposition can capture time-varying spectra. As a feature extraction model, DASAR can provide useful learning features related to signals with complex spectra. The effectiveness of our model was tested on a dataset comprised of 11 different modulation techniques and realistic transmission medium characteristics. Using only 200 128-point samples per modulation scheme (1% of the available signal samples) and a proper selection of a classification algorithm, DASAR reaches accuracy up to 70.96% compared with a maximum accuracy of 43.62% using the state-of-art methods tested under the same conditions.