Blind Digital Modulation Identification for MIMO Systems in Railway Environments With High-Speed Channels and Impulsive Noise

In order to improve on existing radio communications for railways, cognitive radio (CR) is a promising concept, allowing the combination of artificial intelligence and software-defined radios. To ensure the best environmental awareness, as required by CR receivers, automatic modulation identification is a key feature for promoting efficient and secure communications in the CR context. This paper deals with blind modulation identification in the railway transmission environment and specifically considers its two major constraints: the high-speed and the impulsive nature of the noise. To achieve this goal, we propose a feature-based process of blind identification, which is made up of three subsystems: impulsive noise mitigation (which is the main contribution of this paper), feature extraction, and classification. For the purpose of mitigating the impulsive noise, we introduce a blind filtering myriad-based approach, which, in turn, requires the estimation of the noise parameters. Simulation results prove that the developed filtering approach provides a good filtering performance, and consequently, high identification performances of the overall identification system.