This article has been accepted for publication in a future issue of this journal, but has not been
fully edited. Content may change prior to final publication. Citation information: DOI 10.1109/LWC.2019.2963828, IEEE Wireless
Communications Letters
Modulation Recognition with Graph Convolutional
Network
Yabo Liu, Yi Liu and Cheng Yang
Abstract—In most non-cooperative communication systems,
modulation recognition is a fundamental and critical technique.
Traditional methods of modulation recognition can be categorized
as maximum likelihood hypothesis algorithms and pattern recog-
nition algorithms. However, these methods have high complexities
or need additional data preprocessing. Recently, neural network
algorithms have shown great potential in modulation recognition.
In this letter, we propose a method of modulation recognition
by exploiting the graph convolutional network (GCN). However,
GCNs cannot be directly used to perform modulation recognition
since modulated signals are not graphs. To convert signals to
graphs, the modulation dataset is divided into multiple subsets.
We design a feature extraction convolutional neural network
(CNN) and a graph mapping CNN to extract signal features and
map subsets into graphs, respectively. Then we input the graphs
into the GCN to predict modulation modes of unlabeled signals.
The experimental results show that the proposed GCN algorithm
achieves higher recognition accuracy than CNN algorithm and
K-nearest neighbor (KNN) algorithm, especially when SNR is
low.
Index Terms—modulation recognition, graph convolutional
network, convolutional neural network, graph mapping.
I. I NTRODUCTION
Signal modulation techniques are extensively utilized to
efficient data transmission. In non-cooperative communication
systems, modulation recognition (MR) is a very important
approach to recognize modulation modes of unknown signals.
This technique plays an important role in many civilian and
military applications such as cognitive radio and electronic
countermeasures.
Traditional methods of modulation recognition can be cat-
egorized as maximum likelihood hypothesis algorithms and
pattern recognition algorithms. The maximum likelihood hy-
pothesis algorithms are based on rigorous mathematical deriva-
tions. They can make predictions by maximizing its likelihood
functions. Reference [1] proposes an average likelihood ratio
recognition algorithm for various communication systems. It
can be used to recognize phase shift keying modulated signals.
In [2], the authors extend the average likelihood ratio algorithm
to the generalized likelihood ratio recognition scheme, in
which signal high-order statistics are widely used. The hybrid
likelihood ratio recognition algorithm is proposed in [3] by
Yabo Liu and Yi Liu are with the State Key Laboratory of Integrat-
ed Service Network, Xidian University, Xi’an, 710071, China. (e-mail:
ybliu 1994@163.com, yliu@xidian.edu.cn). Their research was supported in
part by the Natural Science Foundation of China (61671341), the project
of Shaanxi importance Industry chain (2018ZDCXL-GY-04-06) and the 111
Project (B08038) of China. Cheng Yang is with the China Coal Xi’an Design
Engineering Co.,Ltd, Xi’an 710054, China. (e-mail: 4658886@qq.com)
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combining above two likelihood algorithms. However, the
complexities of maximum likelihood hypothesis algorithms
are too great. The pattern recognition algorithms contain two
procedures: extracting signal features and classifying. In [4],
the authors extract signal instantaneous statistics and use a
decision tree to recognize modulation modes. [5] performs
a wavelet transform on phase shift keying and frequency
shift keying modulated signals to extract signal features, then
processes the signal features by pattern recognition algorithms.
In [6], the authors extract fourth-order statistics of modulated
signals, and analyze the accuracies of pattern recognition
algorithms various signal-to-noise ratios(SNRs). The types of
extracted signal features have a significant influence on the
modulation accuracy.
Over the past few years, deep learning has been widely
investigated due to its excellent performances in the field of
pattern recognition. Compared with traditional methods such
as pattern recognition, deep learning methods can automatic
extract data features and make predictions. Many deep learning
recognition algorithms based on various networks such as
convolutional neural networks (CNNs) and recurrent neural
networks (RNNs) have been investigated. In [7], the authors
propose a CNN consists of 2 convolutional layers and 2 dense-
ly connected layers to recognize signal modulation modes.
They also open source a modulation dataset built by a universal
software radio peripheral. Furthermore, in [8], the authors
make a comparison between long short time memory networks
(LSTMs) and CNNs in modulation recognition. Simulation
results show that the depth of networks has little effect on the
recognition accuracies. A method that simultaneously inputs
raw signals and their high-order statistics into a RNN to
improve recognition accuracy is proposed in [9]. The higher-
order statistics of signals are input into a two layer auto-
encoder in [10], where a layer-by-layer strategy is adopted
to train the auto-encoder.
Recently, some researches are devoting to processing graph
data with neural networks. One remarkable achievement is
a connectionist model, graph convolutional network (GCN),
which can merge messages transmitting between adjacent
nodes in graphs [11]. GCNs have been successfully used in
text classification, relation extraction and image classification
tasks [12]. This motivates us to utilize GCNs in modulation
recognition. However, GCNs cannot be directly used to pro-
cess signals since they are not graph data. In this letter, we
design two CNNs named as feature extraction CNN (FECNN)
and graph mapping CNN (GMCNN), respectively to extract
signal features and map signals into graphs. Then, we present
This article has been accepted for publication in a future issue of this journal, but has not been fully edited. Content may change prior to final publication. Citation information: DOI 10.1109/LWC.2019.2963828, IEEE Wireless
a signal modulation recognition algorithm based on the GCN.
To the best of our knowledge, this work is the first attempt
to apply GCN to modulation recognition. We evaluate the
performance of the proposed GCN algorithm, and compare
its recognition accuracy with those of the K-nearest neighbor
(KNN) algorithm and CNN algorithm proposed in [7]. Experi-
mental results show that the proposed GCN algorithm achieves
higher recognition accuracy, especially when SNR is low.
II. M ODEL OF GCN BASED M ODULATION R ECOGNITION
In applications of classifying with a typical GCN, every
input graph consists both labeled and unlabeled nodes. The
GCN can classify unlabeled nodes by merging labeled nodes’
messages. In this work, we need to choose some labeled
and unlabeled signals to generate each graph. Hence before
converting signals to graphs, we divide a modulation dataset
into many subsets. Each subset can be described as
X = {{(x1 , y1 ), ..., (xp , yp )} , {x̄1 , ..., x̄q }} ,
where p is the number of labeled signals x and q is the number
of unlabeled signals x̄. Both xi and x̄i are signals in modu-
lation dataset. yi is the label corresponding to xi . {ȳ1 , ..., ȳq }
are the labels of unlabeled signals {x̄1 , ..., x̄q }. Every label
belongs to {1, ..., C}. C is the number of modulation modes.
The GCN algorithm is trained in a supervised manner. The
categories of labeled signals are input into the GCN algorithm
as signal features during forward propagation and the real
categories of unlabeled signals are used to supervise the
training of the GCN algorithm during backward propagation.
The target of each step in training process can be expressed
as
1 signal and E represents the collection of edges. We use the
min L(ϕ(X), {ȳ1 , ..., ȳq }), (2)
q GMCNN to measure differences between every two signals
where L(·) is a loss function and ϕ(·) is the function
parametrized with the GCN algorithm. The output of the GCN
algorithm ϕ(X) contains the predict labels of unlabel signals
in subset X. This algorithm can be divided into three steps:
feature extraction, graph mapping and graph convolution. We
propose an FECNN, a GMCNN and a GCN to realize these
operations, respectively. All the neural networks are trained
jointly in a supervised manner while reducing the classification
bias of unlabeled training signals. The only loss function
in the networks is a cross entropy loss function which is
used between unlabeled signals’ predicted and real labels.
During the jointly supervised training process, the FECNN
and GMCNN are forced to extract as much as possible useful
signal information and produce reasonable graph structures to
help the GCN make correct predictions.
A. Feature extraction
The FECNN used to extract signal features consists of 2
convolutional layers and one densely connected layer. The
input of the FECNN is a two-dimensional matrix whose two
rows are real and imaginary parts of the signal, respectively.
Each convolutional layer is followed by a leaky Relu activation
function to fit nonlinear distribution data. The kernel sizes of
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Communications Letters
subset feature embedding matrixe
P
labeled
signals
feature
extraction
CNN
+ ?
q
unlabeled
signal
?
one-hot
feature embeddings
encodings
Fig. 1. The process of feature extraction by the FECNN.
convolution layers are 1 × 3 and 2 × 3, respectively. Both
of the kernel strides are (2, 1). The numbers of convolutional
kernels are 32 and 64, respectively. The densely connected
layer has 64 neurons. Fig. 1 shows the process of extracting
signal features by the FECNN. Firstly, a subset divided from
the dataset is input into the FECNN. The output of the
(1)
network are feature embeddings of input signals. Later, in
order to involve signals’ label information during the training
process, the embedding features are concatenated with one-hot
encodings of their labels. For p labeled signals in a subset,
their one-hot encodings are derived from their real labels. For
q unlabeled signals in a subset, we set all elements of their one-
hot encoding to 1/C to blur its label. By the feature extraction
process, each subset is transformed into a feature embedding
matrix.
B. Graph mapping
After extracting signal features, we need to map every
subset into a graph G(V , E), where vi corresponds to the i-th
in a subset and output a graph. The input of the GMCNN
is a (p + q) × (p + q) × (64 + C) three dimensional matrix
M . mi,j represents the absolute distance between the feature
embeddings of i-th and j-th signals in a subset. The GMCNN
is composed of 4 convolutional layers. The first, second
and third convolutional layers are followed by a leaky Relu
activation function and batch-normalization. The numbers of
convolutional kernels are 192, 192, 96 and 1, respectively. All
of their kernel sizes are 1 × 1, and their strides are set to
1. The 1 × 1 convolution can merge information of multiple
channels and maintain the size of feature map. By utilizing 1
× 1 convolution, the GMCNN will output a (p + q) × (p + q)
adjacency matrix which illustrates the structure of a graph.
The calculation of edges can be summarized as
ei,j = φ(vi , vj ) = GM CN N (abs(vi − vj ))), (3)
where ei,j is the edge between i-th and j-th nodes. φ(·) is
the function parametrized with the GMCNN. This approach
of computing adjacency matrix has the symmetry property
φ(vi , vj ) = φ(vj , vi ) (4)
and identity property
φ(vi , vi ) = 0. (5)
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Communications Letters

(feature embedding matrixe)

Graph mapping CNN

Graph mapping CNN
Subset

GCN
Softmax

GCN
Recognition result

Layer 1 Layer 2

Fig. 2. The process of graph mapping by the GMCNN

C. Graph convolution into graphs, the dataset is divided into many subsets. We
Since Scarselli et al. proposed the prototype of graph neural set p and q in Eq. (1) be 5×8 and 1, respectively. That is,
network (GNN) in 2009 [13], researchers have developed each subset is composed of 41 signals, including 5 labeled
many variations of GNN such as GCN, graph attention net- signals per modulation mode and only one unlabeled signal. In
work, graph auto-encoder, graph generative network and graph experiment settings, the loss function and activation function
spatial-temporal network. In this work, we consider a simple in the GCN are cross-entropy loss and leaky Relu. Batch size,
implementation of GCN which uses the adjacency operator learning rate and SGD momentum are set to 10, 0.001 and
0.5, respectively. Since the three networks are trained jointly,
they share the same training setup. We first investigate the
!
X
xnk+1 = ρ xkm wk , (6) recognition accuracy of the GCN algorithm versus training
m∈Nn iteration at 10dB SNR. Then, we calculate the recognition
accuracies of all modulation modes with the GCN algorithm.
where xk+1
is the feature vector of n-th node in (k + 1)-th
n
Finally, we compare the recognition accuracy of the GCN
layer, Nn is the set of n-th nodes adjacent nodes, xkm is the
algorithm, KNN algorithm and CNN algorithm proposed in
feature vector of the m-th node in the k-th layer, wk is the
[7].
weighting parameter which connects the n-th node with its
adjacent nodes and ρ(·) is an activation function. During the B. Results
graph convolution, each node sends message to its adjacent
nodes, and each node will merge the messages received from Fig. 3 illustrates the recognition accuracy of the GCN algo-
its adjacent nodes. Then, an activation function is followed rithm versus training iteration at 10dB SNR. From the figure,
to enhance the ability of the GCN to fit data distribution. To the recognition accuracy increases with training progress when
normalize the input data, we use a softmax function on each the iteration is below 9000. Then the recognition accuracy
row of adjacency matrixes in advance. As the GCN deepens, tends to be constant.
the receptive field becomes larger and more messages will 0.8
be included in the prediction. Due to the graphs adjacency
matrixes calculated by the GMCNN are densely connected, 0.7

it is not necessary to set too much layers in the GCN. In

this work, we choose the number of layers in the GCN to be 0.6
Accuracy

2. The graph convolution process is shown in Fig. 2. The

circles represent signals in a subset. The adjacency matrix 0.5

is recalculate before every graph convolution layer. Finally,

0.4 Test accuracy
the feature vector of the unlabeled signal in a subset can be
obtained, and it will be mapped into the final classification by
0.3
the softmax function. 0.5 1 1.5 2
Iteration ×10 4
III. E XPERIMENTAL R ESULTS
Fig. 3. The recognition accuracy of the GCN algorithm versus training
A. Experimental setup iteration at 10dB SNR.
To evaluate the proposed GCN based modulation recog- We also investigate the recognition performance of modula-
nition algorithm, we consider several experiments in this tion modes with the GCN algorithm. The recognition accura-
section. The dataset we generated for this work contains 8 cies of 8 modulation modes with the GCN algorithm are shown
types of digital modulated signals with SNRs varying from in Fig. 4. The recognition accuracies of all modulation modes
-14dB to +10dB. The modulation modes are 2ASK, 4ASK, increase with SNR. Because low-order modulated signals are
2FSK, 4FSK, BPSK, QPSK, 16QAM and 64QAM which are less complex compared with high-order modulated signals, it
widely used in modern communication systems. Every signal is easier for the GCN to extract and learn signal features
is composed of 256 samples. Before mapping the signals from low-order modulated signals. The accuracies of low-

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This article has been accepted for publication in a future issue of this journal, but has not been fully edited. Content may change prior to final publication. Citation information: DOI 10.1109/LWC.2019.2963828, IEEE Wireless
Communications Letters

0.9 TABLE I
T HE COMPARISON OF PARAMETERS AND AVERAGE INFERENCE TIMES
0.8
BETWEEN THE GCN AND CCN ALGORITHMS .

Algorithm Number of parameters Inference time (ms)

0.7
GCN 437071 0.78
Accuracy

CNN 1455768 0.16

0.6
2ASK
4ASK
0.5 2FSK
4FSK
BPSK
IV. C ONCLUSIONS
0.4 QPSK
16QAM In this letter, we propose an initial effort to apply GCN to
64QAM
modulation recognition. In order to convert modulated signals
0.3
-10 -5 0 5 10 to graphs, the dataset is divided into multiple subsets. Each
SNR(dB)
subset consists of 40 labeled signals and one unlabeled signal.
Fig. 4. The recognition accuracies of 8 modulation modes with the GCN We design an FECNN and a GMCNN based on CNNs to
algorithm. extract signal features and map subsets to graphs, respec-
tively. Then we input the graphs into a GCN to recognize
the modulation mode of unlabeled signal. The experimental
order modulated signals are higher than those of high-order results show that the proposed GCN algorithm has a better
modulated signals. performance compared with the CNN algorithm and KNN
algorithm, especially when SNR is low.
0.8

GCN R EFERENCES
0.7 CNN
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0.4
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SNR(dB)
Fig. 5. The comparison of recognition performance among GCN algorithm,
CNN algorithm and KNN algorithm.
The comparison of recognition accuracies among GCN
algorithm, CNN algorithm and KNN algorithm is illustrated
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