Joint modulation classification and antenna number detection for MIMO systems

Noncooperative classification of the modulation type of communication signals finds application in both civilian and military contexts. Existing modulation classification methods for multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) communication systems commonly require a priori information on the number of transmit antennas employed by the multiantenna transmitter, which, in most of the noncooperative scenarios involving modulation classification, is unknown and needs to be blindly extracted from the received signal. Since the problems of MIMO modulation classification and detection of the number of transmit antennas are highly coupled, we propose a decision theoretic approach for spatial multiplexing MIMO systems that considers these two tasks as a joint multiple hypothesis testing problem. The proposed method exhibits a high performance even in moderate to low SNR regimes while requiring no a priori knowledge of the channel state information and the noise variance.