CNN based Joint SNR and Doppler Shift Classification using Spectrogram Images for Adaptive Modulation and Coding

This paper proposes a novel convolutional neural network (CNN) based joint classification method to characterize the signal-to-noise power ratio (SNR) and Doppler shift using spectrogram images, in order to enable efficient adaptive modulation and coding (AMC) designs. It is necessary to maintain high communication performances even in stringent environments where transceivers move at high speed due to the diversification of wireless applications. To optimize the transmission rate in such dynamic environments, AMC scheme is known to be effective. AMC is generally designed based on feedback information (FBI) such as the SNR and Doppler shift acquired on the receiving side. Here, the challenge is an increase in calculation burden, processing delay and estimation accuracy of the FBI. We focused on the spectrogram which is composed of power values in the time and frequency domains. Its two-dimensional fluctuation represents the Doppler shift as well as noise values. In the proposed method, such key information for AMC can be simultaneously extracted from a single spectrogram via a trained CNN. Therefore it is expected to contribute to reducing the computational burden and speeding up the signal processing. Simulation results are presented to demonstrate that the proposed method achieves better performance than traditional methods.