Modulation recognition techniques for improving communication efficiency in SDR networks

Next century demand for a low cost, high efficiency wireless technology is expected to be the commercial implementation of Software Defined Radio (SDR) paradigm. This is expected to improve base station efficiency and robust universal receivers to provide seamless high quality service to the end user. One of the many problems which need to be solved effectively to make SDR infrastructure more efficient is modulation recognition. With robust modulation recognition module at the receiver, there will be no need to communicate transmission format type to the receiver which results in wastage of bandwidth. It will also allow base stations as well as mobiles to use a transmission method which is just right for the given channel conditions and to meet customer requirements on cost and quality of service. In this paper we review some interesting modulation recognition techniques after discussing the modulation recognition problem in some detail. We also present a modulation recognition method using six interesting features and study its performance.