Signal Detection and Classification in Shared Spectrum: A Deep Learning Approach

Accurate identification of the signal type in shared-spectrum networks is critical for efficient resource allocation and fair coexistence. It can be used for scheduling transmission opportunities to avoid collisions and improve system throughput, especially when the environment changes rapidly. In this paper, we develop deep neural networks (DNNs) to detect coexisting signal types based on In-phase/Quadrature (I/Q) samples without decoding them. By using segments of the samples of the received signal as input, a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) and a Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) are combined and trained using categorical cross-entropy (CE) optimization. Classification results for coexisting Wi-Fi, LTE LAA, and 5G NR-U signals in the 5-6 GHz unlicensed band show high accuracy of the proposed design. We then exploit spectrum analysis of the I/Q sequences to further improve the classification accuracy. By applying Short-time Fourier Transform (STFT), additional information in the frequency domain can be presented as a spectrogram. Accordingly, we enlarge the input size of the DNN. To verify the effectiveness of the proposed detection framework, we conduct over-the-air (OTA) experiments using USRP radios. The proposed approach can achieve accurate classification in both simulations and hardware experiments.