Can You Fix My Neural Network? Real-Time Adaptive Waveform Synthesis for Resilient Wireless Signal Classification

Abstract: Thanks to its capability of classifying complex phenomena without explicit modeling, deep learning (DL) has been demonstrated to be a key enabler of Wireless Signal Classification (WSC). Although DL can achieve a very high accuracy under certain conditions, recent research has unveiled that the wireless channel can disrupt the features learned by the DL model during training, thus drastically reducing the classification performance in real-world live settings. Since retraining classifiers is cumbersome after deployment, existing work has leveraged the usage of carefully-tailored Finite Impulse Response (FIR) filters that, when applied at the transmitter's side, can restore the features that are lost because of the the channel actions, i.e., waveform synthesis. However, these approaches compute FIRs using offline optimization strategies, which limits their efficacy in highly-dynamic channel settings. In this paper, we improve the state of the art by proposing Chares, a Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL)-based framework for channel-resilient adaptive waveform synthesis. Chares adapts to new and unseen channel conditions by optimally computing through DRL the FIRs in real-time. Chares is a DRL agent whose architecture is-based upon the Twin Delayed Deep Deterministic Policy Gradients (TD3), which requires minimal feedback from the receiver and explores a continuous action space. Chares has been extensively evaluated on two well-known datasets. We have also evaluated the real-time latency of Chares with an implementation on field-programmable gate array (FPGA). Results show that Chares increases the accuracy up to 4.1x when no waveform synthesis is performed, by 1.9x with respect to existing work, and can compute new actions within 41us.