IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON WIRELESS COMMUNICATIONS, VOL. 22, NO.
9, SEPTEMBER 2023
GGCNN: An Efficiency-Maximizing Gated Graph
Convolutional Neural Network Architecture for
Automatic Modulation Identification
Pejman Ghasemzadeh , Graduate Student Member, IEEE, Michael Hempel , Member, IEEE,
Honggang Wang , Fellow, IEEE, and Hamid Sharif , Fellow, IEEE
Abstract— Automatic modulation identification (AMI) is a
technique to detect the modulation type and order of a received
signal, which has the potential to enhance cognitive radio capabil-
ities for future generations of communication devices. However,
AMI classifiers traditionally have exhibited low efficiency in
low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) environments. Hence, to address
this problem we present our novel Gated Graph Convolutional
Neural Network (GGCNN) classifier for feature-based AMI. This
architecture includes a robust feature extraction stage to extract
deep correlative patterns about the received symbols. Not only
does this feature extraction stage use the temporal characteristics
of the received symbols, but it also takes advantage of embedded
signaling features from the received signal. In the proposed
classifier, the received constellations are treated as a graph, allow-
ing it to outperform state-of-the-art classifiers due to its strong
performance in graph classification. This is observed clearly in
the visualization of the extracted features, even for high-order
modulation schemes. In this paper, we present our systematic
research conducted for maximizing the efficiency obtainable
by our classifier. Extensive simulation results demonstrate a
significant accuracy improvement of 18.44 percentage points, and
an efficiency increase by 60.78% for our GGCNN-AMI classifier
compared to state-of-the-art classifiers in low-SNR environments.
Index Terms— Automatic modulation identification (AMI),
feature-based (FB) classification, gated graph convolutional
neural network (GGCNN), performance analysis, efficiency
improvement.
I. I NTRODUCTION
A UTOMATIC modulation identification (AMI), also
known as automatic modulation classification (AMC),
refers to a signal processing procedure in which a received
signal’s modulation scheme type and order are identified [1].
Manuscript received 26 June 2022; revised 20 December 2022;
accepted 15 January 2023. Date of publication 30 January 2023; date of
current version 12 September 2023. This work was supported in part by the
U.S. Federal Railroad Administration (FRA) and in part by the Rural Railroad
Safety Center (RRSC). The associate editor coordinating the review of
this article and approving it for publication was A. El Gamal. (Corresponding
author: Pejman Ghasemzadeh.)
Pejman Ghasemzadeh, Michael Hempel, and Hamid Sharif are with the
Advanced Telecommunication Engineering Laboratory (TEL), Department of
Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Nebraska–Lincoln,
Lincoln, NE 68588 USA (e-mail: pejman.ghasemzadeh@huskers.unl.edu;
mhempel@unl.edu; hsharif@unl.edu).
Honggang Wang is with the Internet of Things and Data Engineering
Laboratory, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Univer-
sity of Massachusetts at Dartmouth, Dartmouth, MA 02747 USA (e-mail:
hwang1@umassd.edu).
Color versions of one or more figures in this article are available at
https://doi.org/10.1109/TWC.2023.3239311.
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/TWC.2023.3239311
1536-1276 © 2023 IEEE. Personal use is permitted, but republication/redistribution requires IEEE permission.
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6033
AMI enables receivers to blindly identify a received signal’s
modulation scheme, without a priori information about the
signal. This ability has been recognized as an important contri-
bution towards cognitive radio technology [2]. This is because
implementing AMI in receivers provides the transmitter the
freedom to select the best modulation scheme from a wide
pool of available modulation schemes based on the environ-
mental conditions providing that the transmitter functions on
a software-defined-equipped platform. Then, such changes in
transmission characteristics do not need to be communicated
with the receiver [1], [2]. In addition, providing this capability
to a transceiver system can also further help in adapting other
communication parameters such as sample rate in order to
maximize achievable channel throughput [3]. Furthermore,
AMI possesses multiple other civilian applications such as
intelligent modem designs [4], spectrum sensing [5], safety
monitoring or threat assessment [6], interference mitigation
and dynamic spectrum access [7]. All these applications have
either direct or indirect contributions towards the improvement
of cognitive radio technology [8]. Out of these applications,
interference mitigation plays a more prominent role; yet it
traditionally has been a challenge for receivers. With the
near-ubiquitous presence of wireless devices, communication
systems face a significant problem in spectrum congestion [3].
Thus, by deploying AMI at the receiver and then conducting
a sweep of all supported frequencies, the receiver can then
efficiently conduct a survey that maps each frequency to the
main modulation scheme used at that frequency. Any other
modulation scheme used at that frequency is then considered
as an interfering one. Hence, through interference reduction
or avoidance processes driven by that modulation scheme [9],
the receiver can potentially avoid or mitigate the effects of
the interfering signal, and more accurately recover the source
signal of interest [1]. Applying AMI within the realm of civil-
ian cognitive radio applications presents significant research
challenges and opportunities to improve the performance and
efficiency of AMI [10].
AMI designs can be categorized into model-driven and data-
driven approaches [11]. Model-driven approaches, in particular
the likelihood-based (LB) [12] and distribution test-based
AMI [13], suffer from either high computational complexity
in the estimation of the hypothesis model’s parameters or
poor performance when abrupt changes in the pattern of the
received symbols occur [14]. Hence, model-driven approaches
fail to meet the performance efficiency requirements of modern
6034
communications systems in low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR)
environments [15]. On the other hand, data-driven AMI essen-
tially involves deep learning models acting as classifiers that
are robust in pattern recognition [16]. These types of AMI
classifiers are trained before deployment for the modulations
they support over the environments they are intended to
be used in. From among the various deep learning mod-
els [17], convolutional neural networks (CNN) [18] have been
broadly and successfully adopted for AMI by learning valid
representations from complex data and mapping them into
image characteristics and features [19]. Therefore, we select
CNN-based deep learning models to review and assess their
operations in improving the performance and efficiency of
AMI in low-SNR environments.
A. Related Work
Wang et al. [20] proposed a data-driven deep learning
model, which we refer to as DR-CNN in our paper, that com-
bines two CNN-based models trained over different simulated
datasets generated by the authors. Even though their method
of combining CNN-based models performed slightly better
than other AMI classifiers they investigated, their method
achieves lower efficiency since their classification processing
chain appears more computationally complex compared to
other schemes in this domain due to the need for training
and testing two separate CNN structures. Additionally, the use
of simulated datasets rather than real-world captured datasets
makes their approach and the trained classifier less applicable
to real-world scenarios. Zhang et al. [21] proposed a dual-
stream CNN-based model that utilizes long short-term memory
(LSTM) to explore feature interactions of the received signal.
However, while this model could increase the performance
of their AMI classifier for low-order modulation schemes,
such an increase does not occur for higher-order modulation
schemes. This limits their model’s real-world applicability.
Moreover, using dual-stream and LSTM structures in their
model significantly increases their model’s computational
complexity, which leads to lower efficiency for implementation
in low-SNR environments. This model is referred to as LSTM-
CNN in our paper. Meng et al. [22] proposed a CNN-based
deep learning model, which is trained in two different steps
to obtain a closer approximation to the optimal LB approach.
This method exhibits a slight increase in the performance of
the AMI classifier in low-SNR environments based on the
evaluation they provided in their paper. On the other hand, this
model’s high computational complexity due to dual-training
of their model does not represent a practical implementation
of an AMI classifier in a real-world scenario. In our paper’s
comparative analysis, we refer to this method as TwoStep-
CNN. Wang et al. [23] proposed a light-weight CNN-based
model with smaller model sizes, obtained through reduction
in kernel sizes or filter counts, which leads to lower compu-
tational complexity. In our paper, this model is referred to as
Light-CNN. Moreover, in their model, they also took advantage
of SNR estimation in the receiver structure. Due to its very
light-weight feature extraction structure, this model performs
poorly in low-SNR environments. Zhang et al. [24] proposed
a CNN-based model that takes advantage of smooth pseudo
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IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON WIRELESS COMMUNICATIONS, VOL. 22, NO. 9, SEPTEMBER 2023
Wigner-Ville distribution (SPWVD), which can represent both
time and frequency features of the received signal. Considering
a low-SNR environment and a high-order modulation scheme,
SPWVD cannot be effective in carrying deep correlative
information of the received constellation with a low number of
samples due to the integration process in its mathematical rep-
resentation. Improving their AMI classifier therefore increases
the execution latency, which further implies that their classifier
cannot be efficiently used in real-time classification for such
environments and high-order modulation schemes. We refer to
this model as SPWVD-CNN in our paper.
The closest model to CNN-based architectures to observe
the input data as an image and exhibits the capability of learn-
ing convolutional features is graph convolutional neural net-
works (GCNN). In the only GCNN-based work for AMI [25],
referred to as AMRGNN in this paper, the authors implemented
a stacked-layer GCNN architecture with 2 layers followed by
a softmax operation acting as the final classification stage. The
presented results in this work show not only higher classifica-
tion accuracy compared to CNN-based architectures, but also
the likelihood of less computational complexity (less number
of trainable parameters). This initial study of a GCNN-based
model indicates the potential for improving the AMI general
performance in low-SNR environments.
B. Problem Statement
The presented related works and their efforts to improve the
AMI classifier performance can be categorized as follows:
• The first group contains those works adopting a heavy
CNN-based architecture to extract deep correlative infor-
mation from received symbols. Even though these mod-
els have made improvements in increasing the ultimate
classification accuracy of their AMI classifier, they also
significantly increased the computational complexity of
their models structure. This further reduced their model’s
efficiency, which we define as the tradeoff between clas-
sification accuracy and computational complexity, as well
as its suitability for real-world implementations.
• The second group are those related works that adopted
a light-weight CNN-based architecture to maintain or
reduce their model’s computational complexity compared
to literature works. These models fail to produce sig-
nificant improvements in their ultimate AMI classifier’s
classification accuracy, however.
Even though related works all have attempted to increase
the ultimate performance of their AMI classifiers, their models
fail to either produce significant improvements in classification
accuracy or maintain the computational complexity, i.e., exe-
cution latency as defined in subsection B of section III in the
context of AMI. As it is analyzed in subsection D of section
IV, this results in a further decrease in efficiency of their AMI
classifiers in low-SNR environment. This is especially true
considering that high-order modulation schemes will further
exacerbate these problems.
C. Contributions
To improve both the classification accuracy and the effi-
ciency of the AMI classifier in low-SNR environments,
GHASEMZADEH et al.: GGCNN: AN EFFICIENCY-MAXIMIZING GATED GRAPH CONVOLUTIONAL NETWORK ARCHITECTURE FOR AMI 6035

we present our research on a deep learning architecture TABLE I

called “gated graph convolutional neural network” (GGCNN), L IST OF S YMBOLS
which is built upon a feature extraction stage coupled with
a graph convolutional neural network (GCNN) sequence in
order to take advantage of the graph classification capabilities
of such networks. In our architecture for AMI classification,
we design and evaluate a feature extraction stage that consists
of three components: The first component extracts embedded
signaling features, i.e., unbiased cumulants, from the received
samples. Computing these features with any order greater than
2 provides the advantage of eliminating the effect of noise
that follows the Additive White Gaussian Noise (AWGN) dis-
tribution over the received samples. Consequently, providing
such features unaffected by AWGN noise to the subsequent
extraction procedures will improve the ultimate classification
accuracy of the AMI classifier. To further empower the total
feature extraction process, the second component utilizes
two-stacked gated recurrent units (GRU) followed by a short
time-distributed neural network in order to extract more of the
temporal features of the received signal. These features can
help the AMI classifier’s decision-making to be more robust
and stable against abrupt changes in the received samples. The
third component is the designed GCNN sequence that imple-
ments a detection pattern procedure through adjacency matrix
operation coupled with a graph convolutional neural block.
This procedure treats the received constellation as a graph,
while it shows strong performance in graph classification. It is
this capability that is responsible for the improvement in the
proposed GGCNN-AMI classifier’s training and classification
performance in low-SNR environments. In order to further
improve the classification accuracy of the proposed GGCNN-
AMI classifier, we prevent overfitting by utilizing a dropout
operation in the graph convolutional blocks. Additionally,
we implement a dense layer to keep the growth rate of the
network low to eventually incur a very small increase in
the entire AMI classifier’s computational complexity. In order
to design an efficient AMI classifier, we evaluate the effect
of different activation functions and pooling operations, and
the number of GCNN blocks in the GCNN sequence. The
designed feature extraction stage is very well-suited to pro-
duce highly differentiated features, as can be observed from
visualizing the results by plotting the scatter map of the
extracted features. A classification module will follow the fea-
ture extraction stage to label the received signal’s modulation
scheme and its order. Based on our extensive evaluation in
section IV, our proposed GGCNN-AMI classifier not only
exhibits significantly improved classification accuracy, but also integration and the procedure we utilized to maximize the
much higher efficiency compared to the state-of-the-art related efficiency of our architecture through the systematic evaluation
works. In our quantitative analysis, we present the lower and of activation functions and pooling operations are provided
upper performance bounds of AMI classifier as a broader per- in section III. Section IV provides the comparison models
formance evaluation compared to literature works by using the utilized for our quantitative evaluation and a detailed per-
highest- and lowest-order digital modulation schemes available formance analysis of the proposed GGCNN-AMI classifier
within the RadioML dataset, i.e., 256QAM and BPSK. compared to related works. This analysis includes visualization
of our designed feature extraction capability, investigation
D. Paper Organization and List of Symbols of classification accuracy and computational complexity, and
The rest of the paper is organized as follows. Section II finally assessing efficiency. Finally, we conclude the paper in
provides a detailed description of the proposed GGCNN- Section V. Definitions of the important symbols used in this
AMI classifier’s architecture. Information on our simulation paper is summarized in Table I.

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6036
Fig. 1. The proposed GGCNN-AMI classifier’s architecture.
II. P ROPOSED GGCNN-AMI C LASSIFIER
The overview of our proposed GGCNN-AMI classifier’s
architecture can be observed in Fig 1. As can be seen,
the proposed architecture consists of two main components:
the feature extraction module and the classification module.
The feature extraction module itself is comprised of three
procedures to extract embedded signaling features, temporal
features and graph-based features. Next, we will present the
operation of each procedure in the feature extraction stage and
classification module.
A. Embedded Signaling-Based Feature Extraction
One set of the embedded signaling features that can be
extracted from the received signal is the set of high-order
statistics-based (HoS) features. These features are capable of
extracting highly correlative information about the symbols in
the received constellations. This characteristic is of significant
importance to AMI classifiers in order to determine patterns
among the received symbols for modulation schemes with
high orders [26]. Moreover, the effects of the AWGN noise
impacting the received symbols’ extracted HoS features for
any order greater than 2 will be removed [6]. This property
enables the AMI classifier to identify modulation schemes with
high classification accuracy even in low-SNR environments.
This was experimentally proven for AMI classifiers using the
4th -order cumulants [19]. This feature can be computed based
on the numeric complexity of the received symbols. If the
received symbols xi in constellation X are real-valued, the
4th -order cumulants are recursively computed from [26]:
n−1
X (n − 1)!
Cn = Mn − Cm Mn−m ,
m=1
(m − 1)!(n − m)!
where n = 4, and the unbiased signal moment estimator Mn
of order n is computed in (2) based on the two-pass correction
algorithm via computing trial mean [19].
n   X L L of hidden units. The output vector Ht is computed from:
X n −1 X
Mn = ( (xi − X)n−k )( xi − X)k (2)
k i=1 L i=1
k=0
In equation (2), where the L is the number of received
symbols, the mean of the received symbols X is computed
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IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON WIRELESS COMMUNICATIONS, VOL. 22, NO. 9, SEPTEMBER 2023
from:
L
1X
X= xi . (3)
L i=1
When the received symbols xi are complex-valued, the unbi-
ased joint 4th -order cumulants estimator of the received con-
stellation X need to be computed from:
L2
C4 (X) = [(L+1)X 4 −4(L+1)X 3 X
L3 −6L2 +13L−12
4
− 3(L−1)X 2 X 2 +12L(X 2 X X)−6LX ]. (4)
After these embedded signaling-based features are extracted,
they are appended to their original corresponding received
signal vector (constellation) for further processing in the
GCNN sequence.
B. GRU & Short Time-Distributed Neural Network
A fully gated recurrent unit exhibits an increased ability
to be trained over long-term changes with lower frequency
than LSTM, which has been conventionally used in the AMI
domain. Thus, the two-stacked GRU is implemented to deter-
mine temporal patterns among the received symbols, to more
accurately determine symbol boundaries [18]. Additionally,
it requires a lower execution latency than LSTM because it
requires fewer parameters in its optimization procedure. The
other reason to implement a two-stacked GRU followed by
a short time-distributed neural network (STDNN) to extract
temporal features is to incorporate the timing factor in the
training and classification processes to more closely represent
(1) a real-world scenario where the signal is received in a time-
division-based mechanism. The first GRU unit accepts the
input data Xt ∈ Rn×d with n number of samples and d number
of signal inputs at time step t from the received signal vectors
(dataset), and outputs the vector Ht ∈ Rn×d with h number
Ht = Zt ⊙ Ht−1 + (1 − Zt ) ⊙ Kt . (5)
where Ht−1 is the old state of Ht , and where the update gate
Zt ∈ Rn×d and hidden state Kt ∈ Rn×d are computed based
GHASEMZADEH et al.: GGCNN: AN EFFICIENCY-MAXIMIZING GATED GRAPH CONVOLUTIONAL NETWORK ARCHITECTURE FOR AMI
on (6) and (7), respectively.
Zt = σ(Xt Wα + Ht−1 Wβ + bz )
Kt = tanh(Xt Wα + (Rt ⊙ Ht−1 )Wγ + bk )
In (6), σ represents the sigmoid function, and the reset gate
Rt ∈ Rn×d is computed similar to the update gate. The output
of the first GRU unit (Ht ∈ Rn×d ) will be used as the input
for the second GRU unit with the same operation.
The short time-distributed neural network saves the derived
information from the two-stacked GRU using the following
procedure: Through processing of a short time-distributed
neural network layer, which is characterized with weight Wζ ,
bias bζ matrices and total number of time steps T , the output
of the second GRU unit {Ht }Tt=0−1
results in the calculation of
T −1
attention weights α = {αt }t=0 based on a softmax activation
function, as shown in (8).
σ(Ht · Wζ + bζ )
αt = T −1
X
σ(Ht · Wζ + bζ )
t=0
PT −1
It should be noted that t=0 αt = 1 while αt ≥ 0. The
calculated αt will be discarded if αt ⩽ 0. Then the final output
of the short time-distributed neural network is calculated by:
T −1
X
Y= αt Ht .
t=0
This operation will result in: 1) reducing the final output
dimensionality of the two-stacked GRU blocks for each time
step [26], and 2) helps avoid overfitting by following a
temporal attention mechanism performed over the training
time steps. Further details can be found in [26]. Extracted tem-
poral features will be appended to the original corresponding
received signal vectors for processing in graph-based feature
extraction procedure.
C. GCNN Sequence
This sequence is comprised of 3 GCNN blocks and 2 dense
layers, each followed by flattening layers. Please see sub-
section C of section III for justification of the number of
implemented GCNN blocks. Each GCNN block consists of
an adjacency matrix operation followed by a convolutional
block operation. In the context of modulation identification,
the adjacency matrix operation, which interprets the received
constellation as a graph, can be defined as follows: We
consider a family graph intrinsic operator A acting locally on
a given input set of constellations or signals S ∈ Rl×d with d
number of data inputs for each signal on the set of nodes V
(vk ∈ V corresponds to the k th signal, where 1 < k < d) of
a weighted graph G(V, E) with E as the set of edges, which
are unidirectional and acyclic due to the randomness (noise)
of received samples in the constellations [25]. The adjacency
operator
P is defined as A : S → A(S) where (AS)i :=
j∼i w i,j Sj with i ∼ j if and only if (i, j) ∈ E and wi,j
its associated weight [27]. Implementation of aforementioned
adjacency operation in deep learning is a graph neural network
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6037
(6)
(7)
Fig. 2. Implementation of the GCNN block adjacency matrix operation, the
forming layer and their corresponding elements with FC layer filter counts.
layer G(.) receiving the vector of k th signal S(k) ∈ RV ×dk as
input and generates S(k+1) ∈ RV ×dk+1 from:
(k+1) (k)
X
Sl = G(S(k) ) = Activation Function( BS(k) θl ),
l∈A
(8) (10)
where l = d1 , · · · , dk+1 and B represent the sets of input
signal vectors and biases. The set of trainable parameters
(k) (k) (k)
are Θ = {θ1 , · · · , θ|A| } with θl ∈ Rdk ×dk+1 [28]. The
activation function can be selected from the candidate pool of
{ReLU, LeakyReLU, GeLU and ELU} to achieve an efficient
model [29], [30]. We will numerically investigate this in the
next section. We have selected these activation functions for
(9)
their two common properties: 1) their derivative is in the shape
of a step function, and 2) they all are zero-centered [31],
[32], [33], [34]. These properties will reduce the gradient
vanishing problem that can occur during the training of the
model [26]. Approximation to a wide range of graph inference
tasks can be achieved by cascaded operations in the form of
(10) [35]. In particular, generalized cascaded operations are
capable of learning edge features and collect them in form of
the adjacency matrix AK {i,j} from:
(K) (k) (k)
A{i,j} = MLPθ̂ (abs(vi − vj )). (11)
As shown in Fig 2, this operation can be implemented through
a multilayer perceptron (MLP) neural network - a sequence
of fully-connected (FC) layers - that takes as input the abso-
(k) (k)
lute difference between the two vector nodes vi and vj
(received samples) [36]. Fig 2 also shows the forming layers
and their corresponding elements of the MLP neural network.
A batch normalization process with ϵ = 0.001 and π = 0.99 is
applied after MLP neural network implementation to mitigate
the effect of large noise variance in the feature maps possibly
in full measure [27]. ϵ and π represent the small float added to
the variance to avoid dividing by zero, and the momentum for
filter moving average, respectively. Across all of the operations
and features of the GCNN blocks, it is the learning of more
precise edge features, i.e., detecting the relationships of the
received samples through the adjacency matrix operation, that
is the key factor in achieving a more accurate training process,
which in turn enables the AMI classifier to obtain higher
classification accuracy over the entire SNR range, specifi-
cally including for environments with low-SNR characteristics.
This is due to the fact that in this particular problem, edge
6038 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON WIRELESS COMMUNICATIONS, VOL. 22, NO. 9, SEPTEMBER 2023

(K) (K)
Due to the diagonality of either A{i,i+1} or A{i+2,i+3} ,
equation (14) can be rewritten based on equation (15) as:
(K) (K) (K)
A{i,i+1} ∗ A{i+2,i+3} = Xdiag(Â{i+2,i+3} (λ0 ),
(K) (K)
. . . , Â{i+2,i+3} (λN −1 ))XT A{i,i+1} .
(16)

Fig. 3. Graph convolutional blocks’ structure. This operation can be considered as a convolution kernel,
which can be implemented through a set of free parameters
N −1 (K) (K)
features measuring the differences between the vector nodes {θm }m=0 ∼ diag(Â{i+2,i+3} (λ0 ), . . . , Â{i+2,i+3} (λN −1 )) in
(received samples) of two consecutive constellations carry the the Laplacian eigenspace, i.e., Fourier domain. Moreover,
geometric information of the constellations and their points these parameters can also be considered as a function of
(graph nodes). This can mathematically be seen in (11). eigenvalues G(Θ) = diag(θ0 , . . . , θN −1 ), which leads to a
Moreover, edge features also include the direction information rewritten form of equation (16) as:
of graph nodes, which can determine if nodes have a for- (K) (K) (K)
A{i,i+1} ∗ A{i+2,i+3} = XG(Θ)XT A{i,i+1} . (17)
ward, backward, or undirected relationship. Determining the
directionality of nodes’ relationship will improve the training The above convolution kernel operation exhibits notable com-
process due to the fact that it can determine the correlation putational cost due to the eigendecomposition performed in
between graph nodes. The more accurate these features are, each computation described by (17), as well as incompatibility
the higher the ultimate classification accuracy will be. with CNN local connections due to the relationship of the
The adjacency matrix operation is conducted for every two these parameters to the global vertices in the defined Laplacian
received signal vectors (constellations), which will result in space [39]. Addressing these problems involves implementing
(K) (K) (K) a fast localized convolution based on low-order polynomial
a set of adjacency matrices: {A{1,2} , A{3,4} , . . . , A{d−1,d} }.
This set will be used in the next procedure, i.e., graph convo- approximation. Therefore, G(Θ) can be expressed as:
lution block, which its overall structure can be seen in Fig 3. R
X
In each GCNN block, the graph convolutional blocks extract G(Θ) = θr Λ r , (18)
the information related to the frequency of the computed l=0
adjacency matrix characteristics from previous operation in
where R is the polynomial order and {Λ}R r=0 is the vector of
GCNN block. Hence, a Fourier-based operation based on
polynomial coefficients. Then, equation (17) can be rewritten
adjacency matrix should be adopted. We let the eigenvectors
−1 (K) as:
{Xm }N m=0 of the Laplacian of adjacency matrix A{i,j} that R
satisfy the orthogonality condition be used the decomposition (K) (K)
X (K)
A{i,i+1} ∗ A{i+2,i+3} = X( θr Λr )XT A{i,i+1} . (19)
bases in the Fourier transform instead of the conventional
r=0
complex exponentials [37]. N represents the dimension of
eigenvector. Then, the Fourier transform and its inverse can Due to the independence of free parameters and modified
be defined, respectively, as: Fourier transform, we can obtain:
R
N −1 (K) (K) (K)
X
(K) X
T (K) (K) A{i,i+1} ∗ A{i+2,i+3} = θr (XΛr XT )A{i,i+1} , (20)
Â{i,j} (λm ) = Xm (n) A{i,j} (n) = XT A{i,j} , (12) r=0
n=0
N −1 through which eigendecomposition computation is avoided,
(K)
X (K) (K)
A{i,j} = Â{i,j} (λm ) Xm (n) = XÂ{i,j} . (13) since the convolution kernel is then calculated by K number
m=0 of multiplications instead. Incorporating the ReLU activation
function after graph convolution operation with a layer-wise
(K)
This can be interpreted as the expansion of A{i,j} in terms propagation rule can be expressed as:
of eigenvectors of Laplacian [38]. Thus, the convolution over P X R
(K) (K) (K
X
two consecutive adjacency matrix can be converted into a Yi = σ( ( θ{i,i+1} r (XΛr XT )A{i,i+1} )+bj )), (21)
point-wise product in the Fourier domain as: i=0 r=0

(K) (K) (K)

A{i,i+1} ∗ A{i+2,i+3} where P and bj represent the number of trainable param-
N −1
eters and biases, respectively, which are initialized using
X (K) (K) random values. A pooling operation, which is typically used
= Â{i,i+1} (λm )Â{i+2,i+3} (λm )Xm (n), (14)
to compute the statistics of local neighborhoods into a single
m=0
output value, is applied to reduce the complexity of the model.
which can be shortened based on equation (12) as: However, we will investigate the format of this pooling opera-
(K) (K) (K) (K)
tion, i.e., max-, average- or no-pooling, to achieve an efficient
A{i,i+1} ∗ A{i+2,i+3} = X((XT A{i,i+1} ).(XT A{i+2,i+3} )). GGCNN model in the next section. We chose to not investigate
(15) the min-pooling operation as part of this research because

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GHASEMZADEH et al.: GGCNN: AN EFFICIENCY-MAXIMIZING GATED GRAPH CONVOLUTIONAL NETWORK ARCHITECTURE FOR AMI
its principal functionality - selection of identified features
with the least amount of repetition within the feature set and
removal of all others - contradicts with the goal of training
the model to focus on tightly clustered features. If overfitting
happens in an AMI classifier, it generally causes a reduced
classification accuracy, especially when the data behaves more
randomly, which is the case with received samples in low-
SNR environments. Hence, a dropout is employed to prevent
overfitting in the training process. A concatenation process
is applied to pass the raw features extracted from received
symbols by the adjacency matrix operation to the next GCNN
block, where same operation is implemented. Hence, the
output of the graph convolutional block is:
Vi
(K)
= Pooling(Yi
(K) (K)
) + A{i,i+1} .
Network optimization and parameter training are both con-
ducted through minimizing the loss function for each batch
of data and gradient back-propagation algorithm, respectively.
This procedure is similar to the conventional CNN models
apart from the convolution operation as can be seen in equation
(20). As stated above, this modified convolution operation
only involves the addition and multiplication of adjacency
matrix and training parameters. Hence, the two gradients can
be obtained as:
∂J (K) ∂J
= (XΛr XT )A{i,i+1} (K) , (23)
∂θ{i,i+1} r ∂A
{i+2,i+3}
and
P R
∂J X ∂J X 40%, respectively. We selected a smaller than usual training
(K)
= ( (K)
( θ{i,i+1} r (XΛr XT ))).
∂A{i,i+1} i=0 ∂A{i+2,i+3} r=0
This training operation will exhibit the same learning compu-
tational complexity as conventional CNN models [40]. This
fact helps limit the computational complexity of the designed
GCNN sequence. To serve the same purpose, a dense layer
with 16 units, Xavier uniform set for kernel initializer and
no activation function and kernel regularizer is implemented
between each GCNN block. This operation is followed by a
flatten layer to turn the high-dimensional space of extracted
features into a one-dimensional vector to be able to be used
in the subsequent GCNN block, which leverages the same
operation as explained above. Finally, the features that were
extracted and abstracted in the feature extraction stage will
then be used in classification module.
D. Classification Module
The classification module consists of a fully connected
neural network with two layers. The first layer has 96 neurons
while the second layer’s number of neurons s equivalent to the
targeted number of modulation schemes to be classified. The
Softmax activation function produces the final probability of
detecting a given modulation type for a received signal.
With the functionality of each GGCNN-AMI classifier
element detailed, we can observe that designing such fea-
ture extraction stage capable of extracting signaling- and
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6039
temporal-based features on top of the GCNN sequence, where
the deep feature extraction and training processes are con-
ducted by adjacency matrix and graph convolutional block
operations, enables the proposed GGCNN-AMI classifier to
operate with high robustness in low-SNR environments.
III. S IMULATION I NTEGRATION , E VALUATION
P ROCEDURE AND E FFICIENT A RCHITECTURE
This section provides information about the simulation
integration, such as the chosen dataset and the environment
selected for training and testing. We also introduce the eval-
uation procedure along with its comparison factors in our
performance analysis. Using this evaluation procedure, we will
(22) determine an efficient architecture of our proposed GGCNN-
AMI classifier.
A. Simulation Integration
The RadioML 2018.01A dataset [41] is selected as the
modulation signal reference for our evaluation effort. This
dataset contains 24 digital and analog modulation schemes,
each with 4096 signal waveforms at each individual SNR
point. Each signal waveform includes 1024 separate complex
IQ samples (2 × 1024). This creates a dataset of 2,555,904
vectors of modulated signal waveforms. Additionally, having
separate complex IQ samples provides flexibility for the AMI
classifier to process received symbols in their complex or real-
valued forms. The number of training, validation and testing
samples of the RadioML dataset are set to be 50%, 10% and
dataset compared to literature works, specifically with the aim
to represent a real-world scenario where the available and
(24) usable samples for training of an AMI classifier might be few.
By studying the training procedure of most of the literature
works, we realize that their models were each trained on a sub-
set of modulation schemes available in the RadioML dataset.
However, it should be noted that such limited training does not
necessarily represent a real-world scenario, where typically a
transceiver is capable of handling a wide range of modulation
schemes and thus any AMI classifier similarly needs to be
trained on a wide set of modulation schemes. Therefore,
in order to achieve a more realistic view of the performance
and as part of our comparative evaluation, we train our
GGCNN-AMI model as well as the comparison models, which
will be introduced in next section, on all digital modulation
schemes in the dataset. The training procedure is designed
to be executed pre-deployment on a per-modulation scheme
basis, over the entire supported SNR range. We perform
this process for the proposed GGCNN-AMI classifier and all
comparison models. This training procedure represents a more
realistic scenario where the AMI classifier has no a priori
knowledge of the SNR value for the environment where it
will be deployed in.
Our training, validating and testing environments are imple-
mented using the deep learning library Keras running on top
of TensorFlow, executed on our university’s supercomputing
infrastructure, HCC Crane [42]. The training factors for our
designed GGCNN-AMI classifier can be seen in Table II.
6040
TABLE II
GCNN S EQUENCE H YPERPARAMETERS
The adaptive moment estimation (Adam) algorithm has been
used to optimize the learning rate.
B. Evaluation Procedure
The majority of the literature works only investigate the
probability of correct classification of their classifier, while
some also attempt to assess their classifier’s computational
complexity. However, we will incorporate two more factors in
our evaluation procedure to analyze the classifier performance
in more details. Thus, our evaluation will utilize the following
factors:
• Feature Extraction Robustness: In order to highlight
the capabilities of the AMI classifier’s feature extraction
stage to produce highly differentiated features, we can
visualize the scatter map of the extracted features, i.e.,
learned node embeddings for our GGCNN-AMI classifier.
The t-SNE method with learning rate, perplexity and
step size equating to 200, 50 and 5000, respectively,
was used to carry out the visualization procedure for
the extracted features [43]. Through using t-SNE, the
high dimensionality of the feature space from the last
GCNN block is reduced into a 2-dimensional space
for visualization. We created two groups of modulation
schemes: {256QAM, 128QAM and 64QAM} represent-
ing the difficult class, and {8PSK, QPSK and BPSK}
representing the normal class. Each will be plotted at
SN R = 5 dB. It is important to note that through t-SNE,
the distance between any two points in the 2-dimensional
output represents the similarity of their respective feature
vectors in the high-dimensional space.
• Probability of Correct Classification (PCC ): This factor
is directly related to the classification accuracy of the
classifier, and hence is determined by the fraction of
the number of correctly classified received signals over
the total number of received signals that were classified.
In our evaluation, in order to more broadly investigate
and analyze the performance of the AMI classifiers,
we selected both the highest- and lowest-order digi-
tal modulation schemes available within the RadioML
dataset, i.e. 256QAM and BPSK, in order to determine
the lower and upper performance bounds of an AMI
classifier’s PCC . It can therefore be stated that the
performance of all these AMI classifiers for any other
modulation scheme found in the RadioML dataset is
bounded by these two limits.
• Execution Latency (τ ): The execution time of the
AMI classifier, which is a key contributor to the overall
execution latency of the receiver, was selected as an
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expression representing the computational complexity of
the AMI classifier design. Since the training and vali-
dation processes of the AMI models are assumed to be
carried out before their deployment in the environment,
we will separately assess the computational complexity
for training + validation and classif ication in terms
of execution latency. In order to ensure a fair comparison
regardless of the computing power of the implementa-
tion platform, we independently normalize the execution
latency for training + validation and classif ication
by their respectively fastest performing model.
• Efficiency (ρ): We define the efficiency of AMI classi-
fier as the tradeoff between their probability of correct
classification and execution latency. In other words, this
factor will show us the fraction of what AMI classi-
fier will achieve over what it spends. Hence, we can
mathematically define the efficiency ρ for any modu-
lation scheme as the ratio of the average probability
of correct classification across the entire evaluated SNR
range over the execution latency for τ ∈ {training +
validation and/or classif ication} as:
1 X
PCC iSN R
N
SN R
ρ{τ } = , (25)
τ
where i ∈ M and N are the set of all modula-
tion schemes to be investigated and the number of
SNR values, respectively. For this evaluation, M =
{BP SK, 256QAM } and N = 40.
C. Efficiency-Maximization Approach for Our Architecture
Now that the efficiency of an AMI classifier is defined,
and before we proceed to present the evaluation for our
GGCNN-AMI model compared to literature works, we need
to establish the most efficient architecture configuration of
our GGCNN-AMI model. In the first step, we determine
how many GCNN blocks are needed to efficiently extract
deep correlative information from received samples. However,
before determining so, we need to ensure the correctness of
our model design, our dataset and our approach to parameter
initialization. To achieve this verification, we can observe
that the trend of the training and validation accuracy and
loss over different training iterations follows the expected
trend, i.e., the accuracy increases and the loss decreases
with each iteration. We perform this verification stage by
selecting 3 GCNN blocks, ELU as the activation function, the
no-pooling operation, and then training this model architecture
for 16QAM at SN R = 0 dB. The results of this test are
shown in Fig 4. From the results we can indeed confirm the
expected behavior of our model during training. It should be
noted that all the curves in this paper have been interpolated
and smoothed for better visibility.
From Fig 4, we can observe that as the number of iterations
increases, the training and validation accuracy also increases,
while the training and validation loss decreases.
Now that we are ensured that every element in the model’s
architecture works as expected, we can proceed with determin-
ing the most effective number of GCNN blocks to be used in
GHASEMZADEH et al.: GGCNN: AN EFFICIENCY-MAXIMIZING GATED GRAPH CONVOLUTIONAL NETWORK ARCHITECTURE FOR AMI
Fig. 4. Training and validation accuracy and loss for our designed model
during the model verification process (3 GCNN blocks, ELU as activation
function, no-pooling, 16-QAM, 0 dB SNR).
Fig. 5. Average PCC based on the number of GCNN block.
the final architecture. To accomplish this, we can simply inves-
tigate the PCC gain versus execution latency increase while
stepwise increasing the number of GCNN blocks. Fig 5 shows
the average PCC for all modulation schemes for these tests
using 1 through 4 GCNN blocks. It should be noted that since
at this point we have not yet conducted our investigation into
determining the best choice for activation function and pooling
operations, we will continue to use ELU and no-pooling for
determining the best number of GCNN blocks.
As can be seen from Fig 5, increasing the number of GCNN
block from 1 to 2 and from 2 to 3 results in a significant
improvement of PCC by on average 15.45 and 17.09 per-
centage point (p.p.) across the entire range of SNR. However,
having 4 GCNN blocks does not exhibit any substantial PCC
gain. We observe only a gain of 2.81 p.p. on average compared
to using 3 GCNN blocks, especially in lower SNR values,
which is the focus of this paper. Investigating the execution
latency, shown in Table III, alongside the results in Fig 5
provides confirmation that the selection of 3 GCNN blocks
for the final model’s architecture provides the most effective
and efficient performance outcome.
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6041
TABLE III
E XECUTION L ATENCY FOR 1-4 GCNN B LOCKS IN S ECONDS
Fig. 6. Probability of correct classification for the 12 combinations of acti-
vation functions and pooling operations after averaging across all modulation
schemes.
Based on Table III, adding a GCNN block will incur a
relative increase of 8% in execution latency. This increase
in execution latency justifies the PCC improvement for up
to 3 GCNN blocks. Hence, we select to use 3 GCNN blocks
in our proposed model’s architecture.
In the second step of determining the efficient architecture,
we will need to evaluate different options for activation
function selection in the adjacency matrix, as shown in Fig 2
and equation (10), and for different pooling operations within
the Graph convolutional block, as shown in Fig 3 and equation
(22). For this purpose, as mentioned earlier, we study four
different activation functions (ReLU, LeakyReLU, GeLU and
ELU) and three different pooling operations (max-, average-
or no-pooling), resulting in 12 combinations that can be used
in our model. For determining the most effective combination,
we first need to investigate each combination’s probability of
correct classification. We conduct this evaluation by averaging
across all available modulation schemes within our dataset.
This allowed us to include any modulation-specific effects
in this selection process. The resulting PCC averaged across
modulation schemes can be seen in Fig 6, plotted for all
12 aforementioned activation+pooling combinations.
We can observe from these results that purely in terms
of accuracy, the combination of LeakyReLU + No Pooling
6042
TABLE IV
N ORMALIZED E XECUTION L ATENCY OF 12 C OMBINATIONS TO D ETER -
MINE E FFICIENT A RCHITECTURE
TABLE V
C OMPUTED E FFICIENCY FOR E ACH A FOREMENTIONED C OMBINATION
achieved the highest overall results. However, in order to
obtain the efficiency of each combination of activation function
and pooling operation, we also need to consider the execution
latency. The execution latency for training + validation and
classif ication is computed and can be seen in Table IV. For
ease of comparison we normalized the execution latency using
the lowest achieved latency.
This will lead to compute the efficiency for each combina-
tion, which can be seen in Table V.
As can be seen from Table IV and Fig 6, the max-pooling
operation demonstrates a higher probability of correct classifi-
cation as well as efficiency with any of the activation functions
compared to the average-pooling operation. This very well
connects to the training of free parameters in the graph con-
volutional block and their relationship with the global vertices
in the Laplacian space, as explained in the previous section.
Additionally, selecting LeakyReLU for the activation function
and max-pooling as the pooling operation will achieve the
highest efficiency among all evaluated combinations. Hence,
this architecture is adopted for our performance analysis and
comparison against other literature works that is shown in the
next section.
IV. P ERFORMANCE A NALYSIS AND D ISCUSSION
In this section, we compare the performance of our
GGCNN-AMI model against various models including the
CNN-based models discussed in section I-A as related
works [20], [21], [22], [23], [24], [25]. Our comparison also
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Fig. 7. Training and validation accuracy and losses of the comparison models.
extends to the neural network models referred to as VGG
and RN implemented in [41]. The CNN-based models were
selected because they exhibit similar capability of learning
convolutional features from the input data to GCNN-based
models. The models in [41] were also selected because they
have a very high referral rate within the AMI research commu-
nity. We reconstructed their models and validated this imple-
mentation by comparing the number of trainable parameters
and the trend of their results for PCC . In our evaluation,
we adjusted their training procedure as explained in the
previous section. In order to ensure the correct reconstruction
process of these models as well as the adjusted training
procedure, the training and validation accuracy and losses of
these models are plotted in Fig 7 for 16QAM at SN R = 0 dB,
similar to Fig 4.
As we can see from Fig 7, the training and validation accu-
racy increases as the number of the trained epochs increases,
while the training and validation loss decreases, as expected.
Next, we will investigate and compare the performance of
our model against comparison models based on the evaluation
factors introduces in the previous section.
A. Extracted Feature Visualization
One of the factors that can provide intuition for robustness
of a feature extraction module or stage is visualizing the
extracted features to determine how distinct these features
are. The more distinct the extracted features of a class or
group are, the more robust the feature extraction stage is.
This will have direct impact on the classification accuracy
since better separation aids in distinguishing between features
classes. Visualization of the extracted features is conducted by
using the t-SNE method, as described earlier. Fig 8 shows the
plotted scatter map visualization of the extracted features for
our GGCNN-AMI model.
GHASEMZADEH et al.: GGCNN: AN EFFICIENCY-MAXIMIZING GATED GRAPH CONVOLUTIONAL NETWORK ARCHITECTURE FOR AMI 6043

Fig. 8. Scatter map visualization of the proposed GGCNN-AMI classifier.

As can be seen in Fig 8, the centers of the extracted fea-

tures show significant separation from one another. This fur-
ther helps with grouping the extracted features and leads
to higher classification accuracy of the GGCNN-AMI clas-
sifier. We can observe that the extracted features for the
lowest-order modulation schemes in both difficult and normal
classes are entirely separated from other extracted features.
For higher-order modulation schemes in both classes, the
distribution of extracted features is less pronounced but still
observable. This observation of groupings cannot be observed,
however, when evaluating the comparison models’ approaches,
as demonstrated in Fig 9.
The LSTM-CNN model, shown in Fig 9(e), is the only
one capable of clustering the extracted features closer to
one another. Yet, the coverage area of these features sig-
nificantly overlap and are far less separable, which visu-
ally indicates difficulty for the classifier to determine any
decision-making boundaries for classification. On the other
hand, the AMRGCNN model, which has a similar operating
principle as our proposed GGCNN-AMI model, shows some
capability in clustering the extracted features for the BPSK
and QPSK modulation schemes. This can be seen in Fig 9(b).
Based on this analysis, the feature extraction module
designed in this research demonstrates its capacity in grouping
and separating the extracted features. This capability is the
foundation of the improvement of the AMI classifier classi- Fig. 9. Scatter map visualization of the extracted features of each comparison
fication accuracy directly impacting the PCC , which will be model’s approach.
evaluated in the following subsection.
achieves on average a 15.38 p.p. higher classification accuracy
B. Probability of Correct Classification for the 256QAM modulation scheme compared to all other
As mentioned in the previous section, this evaluation of AMI classifiers, which all follow a very similar trend. This
the PCC is presented utilizing the lower and upper bounds is a very substantial improvement for low-SNR environments.
of PCC , corresponding the PCC obtained for 256-QAM and For the upper SNR range (SN R >= 5 dB), the improvement
BPSK, respectively. The results of this analysis are shown in achieved by the proposed GGCNN-AMI classifier further
Fig 10. increases compared to other AMI classifiers. We can clearly
The curves are interpolated for more convenient observation observe a steeper slope in accuracy improvement as the SNR
of each curve’s trend. We will separately analyze and discuss increases. This allows the proposed GGCNN-AMI classifier
the lower and upper bounds. to achieve 100% accuracy at around SN R = 26 dB whereas
1) Lower Performance Bound Discussion: As can be all other AMI classifiers achieve this accuracy level only for
observed from Fig 10(a), the proposed GGCNN-AMI classifier SN R = 30 dB or higher. For the same SNR range, numerical
outperforms all other AMI classifiers over the entire studied assessment shows that the proposed GGCNN-AMI classifier
SNR range. For the lower SNR range (SN R < 5 dB), as a achieves on average a 26.41 p.p. higher classification accuracy
quantitative evaluation, the proposed GGCNN-AMI classifier compared to all other AMI classifiers.

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6044
Fig. 10. Classification accuracy of the proposed GGCNN-AMI classifier
compared to related works for lower and upper bounds.
2) Upper Performance Bound Discussion: For the lower
range of SNR (SN R < 5 dB), observing Fig 10(b) demon-
strates that the proposed GGCNN-AMI classifier outperforms
the other approaches by on average 14.18 p.p. higher accuracy
compared to all other AMI classifiers. Similar to the previous
discussion, this is also a significant improvement in low-SNR
environments. For the SNR range between 5 dB and 15 dB,
we can observe similar performance gains. For the upper SNR
range (SN R > 15 dB), the performance difference begins to
shrink, since all AMI classifiers tend to reach their highest
accuracy.
In summary, Table VI indicates the percentage point
improvement for average of the proposed GGCNN-AMI clas-
sifier compared to the other tested classifiers, for the lower
and upper performance bounds in two SNR ranges: low-SNR
(SN R < 5 dB) and high-SNR (SN R >= 5 dB).
Analyzing the metrics in Fig 11 helps explain the higher
performance of the proposed GGCNN model. The area under
the receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve in Fig 11(a)
for the proposed GGCNN model is intuitively larger than
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TABLE VI
AVERAGE P ERFORMANCE G AIN OF THE P ROPOSED GGCNN-AMI
C LASSIFIER C OMPARED TO OTHER C LASSIFIERS
other models, indicating that the proposed GGCNN model
exhibits more robustness in labeling each received signal
frame’s modulation scheme. This can also be observed in
Fig 11(b), where the decision threshold versus detection prob-
ability is plotted. As the decision threshold is increases, i.e.,
the threshold upon which the decision is made for labeling the
received signal’s modulation scheme, the detection probability
for other models drops more dramatically than for the pro-
posed GGCNN model. This means that other models label the
received signal’s modulation scheme with less confidence. For
example, the Light-CNN model never labels a received signal’s
modulation scheme equal to or higher than 90%, whereas
the proposed GGCNN model labels 10% of the total labeled
data with 100% probability. This scenario mostly happens for
low-order modulation schemes in very high SNRs. Such higher
performance can lead to higher success of prediction, which
can be seen in Fig 11(c) where the precision versus recall
curves are plotted. As can be seen, the higher area under
the curve for the proposed GGCNN model represents both
high recall and high precision, where high precision relates
to a low false-positive rate, and high recall relates to a low
false-negative rate. High scores for both demonstrate that the
proposed GGCNN model is returning accurate results (high
precision) as well as returning a majority of all positive results
(high recall).
C. Execution Latency
Based on the explanation of evaluating the execution latency
for AMI classifiers provided in the previous section, the
normalized execution latency of the investigated AMI clas-
sifiers computed separately for training + validation and
classif ication can be seen in Table VII.
For the normalized training + validation and
classif ication execution latency, the proposed GGCNN-AMI
classifier achieves a 37.62% lower normalized execution
latency compared to TwoStep-CNN, a 23.55% lower latency
compared to LSTM-CNN, and a 11.14% reduction in latency
compared to RN. On the other hand, it resulted in a 91.5%,
27.67%, 18.21%, 23.95% and 6.39% higher execution latency
compared to the Light-CNN, DR-CNN, SPWVD-CNN, VGG
and AMRGCNN models, respectively. We will numerically
show that even though the proposed GGCNN-AMI classifier
has higher execution latency than some AMI classifiers, it has
significantly higher efficiency and thus is a more suitable
choice for real-time implementations.
GHASEMZADEH et al.: GGCNN: AN EFFICIENCY-MAXIMIZING GATED GRAPH CONVOLUTIONAL NETWORK ARCHITECTURE FOR AMI 6045

Fig. 11. This figure shows the receiver operating characteristic (ROC), decision threshold versus detection probability and precision versus recall plots for
the proposed GGCNN model compared to related works.

TABLE VII
N ORMALIZED E XECUTION L ATENCY OF E VALUATED AMI C LASSIFIERS

D. Efficiency
Based on the definition of AMI classifier efficiency pre-
sented in the previous section, Fig 12 shows the computed ρ
for each AMI classifier based on the lower and upper perfor-
mance bounds, shown separately for training + validation
and classif ication.
Fig 12(a) shows that the efficiency of the proposed
GGCNN-AMI classifier is on average 63% and 87.84%
higher than the comparison models’ training + validation
or classif ication efficiency, respectively. Fig 12(b) indi-
cates an average efficiency improvement of 43.23% and
49% for training + validation or classif ication effi-
ciency, respectively, for the proposed GGCNN-AMI clas-
Fig. 12. Computed efficiency for each AMI classifier based on lower
sifier compared to all other investigated comparison and upper bounds for their respective training + validation and
models. classif ication execution latency.
To summarize, the efficiency of the proposed GGCNN-AMI
classifier is on average 75.42% and 46.11% higher for
V. C ONCLUSION
lower and upper bounds, respectively, while considering both
training + validation and classif ication execution latency In this research, we proposed a novel architecture to
compared to all comparison models. In other words, our maximize the efficiency of feature-based AMI in low-SNR
GGCNN approach achieves on average a 60.78% higher environments. The proposed GGCNN-AMI classifier includes
efficiency, which further provides a compelling argument jus- a feature extraction module, where embedded signaling-based
tifying the incurred increase in execution latency. In particular, and temporal features are extracted and appended to the
the high efficiency of GGCNN for the lower bound confirms original received signal. Additionally, a sequence of graph
that the proposed GGCNN-AMI classifier was very successful convolutional neural networks is implemented to extract the
in improving the AMI classifier performance for low-SNR graph-based features. Considering the significant effect of the
environments, while not significantly increasing computational activation function and pooling operation on the performance
complexity. of the AMI classifier, we adopted an efficient architecture

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6046 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON WIRELESS COMMUNICATIONS, VOL. 22, NO. 9, SEPTEMBER 2023
through investigating all combinations of activation functions
and pooling operations considered in this research. Visual-
ization of the scatter maps of the extracted features showed
the robustness of our designed feature extraction module in
producing highly distinguishable features, which will directly
impact the decision making bounds of the AMI classifier.
The proposed GGCNN-AMI classifier exhibits a significant
improvement of 20.89 p.p. and 16 p.p. in low-SNR envi-
ronments for 256QAM and BPSK, respectively, representing
the lower and upper performance bounds. We also evalu-
ated the execution latency and efficiency of our proposed
GGCNN-AMI classifier and compared them against those of
other state-of-the-art published AMI classifiers. We showed
that the proposed GGCNN-AMI classifier achieves a signifi-
cant efficiency improvement by, on average, 60.78% compared
to all AMI classifiers investigated as part of this research.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
This study is being conducted at the University of Nebraska-
Lincoln by the faculty and students at the Advanced Telecom-
munications Engineering Laboratory (www.TEL.unl.edu).
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Pejman Ghasemzadeh (Graduate Student Mem-
ber, IEEE) received the M.Sc. degree in telecom-
munications engineering from the University of
Nebraska–Lincoln, Lincoln, NE, USA, in 2020,
where he is currently pursuing the Ph.D. degree
in computer engineering with the Department of
Electrical and Computer Engineering. He has been
a Research Assistant at the Advanced Telecom-
munication Engineering Laboratory (TEL). He has
authored a number of technical research papers cov-
ering topics in wireless communications, signal pro-
cessing, backscatter communications, and machine learning in IEEE/ASME
T RANSACTIONS, journals, and international conferences. He has also served
as a technical reviewer for several IEEE T RANSACTIONS, journals, and
international conferences.
Authorized licensed use limited to: University of Nebraska - Lincoln. Downloaded on May 20,2024 at 19:49:13 UTC from IEEE Xplore. Restrictions apply.
6047
Michael Hempel (Member, IEEE) received
the Ph.D. degree in computer engineering from
the University of Nebraska–Lincoln, Nebraska.
He is currently working as a Research Assistant
Professor at the Advanced Telecommunication
Engineering Laboratory (TEL), University of
Nebraska–Lincoln. He has authored or coauthored
more than 150 publications in major international
journals and conferences. His research interests
include wireless communication protocol design
and performance analysis, wireless multimedia
services, and distributed computing. For his research in networking, he has
also been developing various network simulation and analysis solutions for
streaming media and WiFi/WiMAX technologies. He has served as a TPC
member for numerous international conferences.
Honggang Wang (Fellow, IEEE) is currently a Pro-
fessor at the University of Massachusetts (UMass)
Dartmouth. His research interests include wireless
health, body area networks, cyber security, mobile
multimedia and cloud, wireless networks and cyber-
physical systems, and big data in mHealth. He has
also been serving as the Editor-in-Chief for IEEE
I NTERNET OF T HINGS J OURNAL.
Hamid Sharif (Fellow, IEEE) is currently the
Charles J. Vranek Professor with the Department
of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University
of Nebraska–Lincoln (UNL), where he is also the
Director of the Advanced Telecommunication Engi-
neering Laboratory (TEL). He has published about
400 research papers in national and international
journals and conferences. He has been serving on
many IEEE and other international journal’s editorial
boards. He was a recipient of a number of research
and best papers awards. He is currently a Distin-
guished Lecturer of the IEEE Vehicular Technology Society.