A semi-supervised learning approach towards automatic wireless technology recognition

Radio spectrum has become a scarce commodity due to the advent of several non-collaborative radio technologies that share the same spectrum. Recognizing a radio technology that accesses the spectrum is fundamental to define spectrum management policies to mitigate interference. State-of-the-art approaches for technology recognition using machine learning are based on supervised learning, which requires an extensive labeled data set to perform well. However, if the technologies and their environment are entirely unknown, the labeling task becomes time-consuming and challenging. In this work, we present a Semi supervised Learning (SSL) approach for technology recognition that exploits the capabilities of modern Software Defined Radios (SDRs) to build large unlabeled data sets of IQ samples but requires only a few of them to be labeled to start the learning process. The proposed approach is implemented using a Deep Autoencoder, and the comparison is carried out against a Supervised Learning (SL) approach using Deep Neural Network (DNN). Using the DARPA Colosseum test bed, we created an IQ sample data set of 16 unknown radio technologies and obtain a classification accuracy of > 97% using the entire labeled data set using both approaches. However, the proposed SSL approach achieves a classification accuracy of >= 70% while using only 10% of the labeled data. This performance is equivalent to 4.6x times better classification accuracy than the DNN using the same reduced labeled data set. More importantly, the proposed approach is more robust than the DNN under corrupted input, e.g., noisy signals, which gives us to 2x and 3x better accuracy at Signal-to-Noise Ratio (SNR) of -5 dB and 0 dB, respectively.