Analysis of Minimum Hellinger Distance Identification for Digital Phase Modulation

This paper presents a modulation identification (MOD ID) method for digital M-ary phase-shift keying (M-PSK) under additive white Gaussian channel, using the minimum Hellinger distance (MHD). When compared with the maximum likelihood (ML) method, the MHD has two significant advantages, low complexity and robustness against perturbations. In addition, the MHD is implementable for MOD ID by partitioning the I-Q plane. Our contribution is as follows. We obtain theoretical results for the modulation identification error probability of the MHD. Employing the Hellinger distance criteria, we present a sub-optimal partition design. Computer simulation experiments compare the MHD and the ML methods regarding the MOD ID performance and show that difference in performance is around 2dB in ideal channel.