Automatic Modulation Classification Based on a Dynamic Graph Architecture
Xiguo Liu, Zhongyang Mao, Min Liu, Chuan Wang, Zhuoran Cai · Applied Sciences · 2025
As the Internet of Things (IoT) expands and spectrum resources become increasingly scarce, Automatic Modulation Classification (AMC) has become critical for enabling dynamic spectrum access, interference mitigation, and spectrum monitoring without coordination or prior signaling. Most deep learning-based AMC methods (e.g., CNNs, LSTMs, Transformers) operate in Euclidean spaces and therefore overlook the non-Euclidean relationships inherent in modulated signals. We propose KGNN, a graph-based AMC architecture that couples a KNN-driven graph representation with GraphSAGE convolutions for neighborhood aggregation. In the KNN stage, each feature vector is connected to its nearest neighbors, transforming temporal signals into structured graphs, while GraphSAGE extracts relational information across nodes and edges for classification. On the RML2016.10b dataset, KGNN attains an overall accuracy of 64.72%, outperforming strong baselines (including MCLDNN) while using only one-eighth the number of parameters used by MCLDNN and preserving fast inference. These results highlight the effectiveness of graph convolutional modeling for AMC under practical resource constraints and motivate further exploration of graph-centric designs for robust wireless intelligence.