A lightweight deep learning architecture for automatic modulation classification of wireless internet of things

Abstract The wireless Internet of Things (IoT) is widely used for data transmission in power systems. Wireless communication is an important part of the IoT. The existing modulation classification algorithms have low classification accuracy when facing strong electromagnetic interference, which causes decoding error link interruption and wastes wireless channel resources. Therefore, it is necessary to study signal modulation classification methods in a low signal‐to‐noise ratio (SNR) environment. In this paper, a lightweight Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) modulation classification method based on the Informer architecture classifier and two‐dimensional (2‐D) curves input of the spectral correlation function (SCF) is proposed, which uses in‐phase and quadrature (I/Q) signals to generate 2‐D cross‐section SCF curve first and then feeds the feature curve into the Informer network to classify the modulation method. This model can better learn the robustness characteristics in a long sequence. Through testing, the classification accuracy of the modulation signal is not much lower than that of the current good classification method when the SNR is 10 dB, and this method can still show higher accuracy when hardware resources are limited. It is a compact design of a modulation classification model and easy to deploy on low‐cost embedded platforms.