A light neural network for modulation detection under impairments

We present a neural network architecture able to efficiently detect modulation techniques in a portion of I/Q signals. This network is lighter by up to two orders of magnitude than other architectures working on the same or similar tasks. Moreover, the number of parameters does not depend on the signal duration, which allows processing stream of data, and results in a signal-length invariant network. In addition, we develop a custom simulator able to model the different impairments the propagation channel and the demodulator can bring to the recorded I/Q signal: random phase shifts, delays, roll-off, sampling rates, and frequency offsets. We benefit from this data set to train our neural network to be invariant to impairments and quantify its accuracy at disentangling between modulations under realistic real-life conditions.