Blind Digital Modulation Classification Using Minimum Distance Centroid Estimator and Non-Parametric Likelihood Function

In this paper, we propose a blind modulation classifier that differs from most existing classifiers. A low complexity minimum distance centroid estimator is suggested to estimate the channel gain and carrier phase jointly. The estimation is achieved by minimizing a signal-to-centroid distance. A new non-parametric likelihood function is proposed for fast classification with unknown noise variance and distribution. Numerical results show that the estimator provides reliable estimation of signal centroids, enabling an accurate classification with a non-parametric likelihood function. When different channel conditions are simulated, the proposed blind classifier achieves similar classification accuracy versus non-blind state-of-the-art classifiers while being more robust and having much lower complexity.