Optical neural networks have long cast attention nowadays. Like other optical structured neural networks, fiber neural networks which utilize the mechanism of light transmission to compute can take great advantages in both computing efficiency and power cost. Though the potential ability of optical fiber was demonstrated via the establishing of fiber neural networks, it will be of great significance of combining both fiber transmission and computing functions so as to cater the needs of future beyond 5G intelligent communication signal processing. Thus, in this letter, the fiber neural networks and their related optical signal processing methods will be both developed. In this way, information derived from the transmitted signals can be directly processed in the optical domain rather than being converted to the electronic domain. As a result, both prominent gains in processing efficiency and power cost can be further obtained. The fidelity of the whole structure and related methods is demonstrated by the task of modulation format recognition which plays important role in fiber optical communications without losing the generality.

A physical-layer modulator is a vital component for an IoT gateway to map the symbols to signals. However, due to the soldered hardware chipsets on the gateway's motherboards or the diverse toolkits on different platforms for the software radio, the existing solutions either have limited extensibility or are platform-specific. Such limitation is hard to ignore when modulation schemes and hardware platforms have become extremely diverse. This paper presents a new paradigm of using neural networks as an abstraction layer for physical layer modulators in IoT gateway devices, referred to as NN-defined modulators. Our approach addresses the challenges of extensibility and portability for multiple technologies on various hardware platforms. The proposed NN-defined modulator uses a model-driven methodology rooted in solid mathematical foundations while having native support for hardware acceleration and portability to heterogeneous platforms. We conduct the evaluation of NN-defined modulators on different platforms, including Nvidia Jetson Nano and Raspberry Pi. Evaluations demonstrate that our NN-defined modulator effectively operates as conventional modulators and provides significant efficiency gains (up to $4.7\times$ on Nvidia Jetson Nano and $1.1\times$ on Raspberry Pi), indicating high portability. Furthermore, we show the real-world applications using our NN-defined modulators to generate ZigBee and WiFi packets, which are compliant with commodity TI CC2650 (ZigBee) and Intel AX201 (WiFi NIC), respectively.

Blind modulation classification is an important step to implement cognitive radio networks. The multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) technique is widely used in military and civil communication systems. Due to the lack of prior information about channel parameters and the overlapping of signals in the MIMO systems, the traditional likelihood-based and feature-based approaches cannot be applied in these scenarios directly. Hence, in this paper, to resolve the problem of blind modulation classification in MIMO systems, the time-frequency analysis method based on the windowed short-time Fourier transform is used to analyse the time-frequency characteristics of time-domain modulated signals. Then the extracted time-frequency characteristics are converted into RGB spectrogram images, and the convolutional neural network based on transfer learning is applied to classify the modulation types according to the RGB spectrogram images. Finally, a decision fusion module is used to fuse the classification results of all the receive antennas. Through simulations, we analyse the classification performance at different signal-to-noise ratios (SNRs), the results indicate that, for the single-input single-output (SISO) network, our proposed scheme can achieve 92.37% and 99.12% average classification accuracy at SNRs of -4 dB and 10 dB, respectively. For the MIMO network, our scheme achieves 80.42% and 87.92% average classification accuracy at -4 dB and 10 dB, respectively. This outperforms the existing classification methods based on baseband signals.

In this paper, we investigate the design and implementation of machine learning (ML) based demodulation methods in the physical layer of visible light communication (VLC) systems. We build a flexible hardware prototype of an end-to-end VLC system, from which the received signals are collected as the real data. The dataset is available online, which contains eight types of modulated signals. Then, we propose three ML demodulators based on convolutional neural network (CNN), deep belief network (DBN), and adaptive boosting (AdaBoost), respectively. Specifically, the CNN based demodulator converts the modulated signals to images and recognizes the signals by the image classification. The proposed DBN based demodulator contains three restricted Boltzmann machines (RBMs) to extract the modulation features. The AdaBoost method includes a strong classifier that is constructed by the weak classifiers with the k-nearest neighbor (KNN) algorithm. These three demodulators are trained and tested by our online open dataset. Experimental results show that the demodulation accuracy of the three data-driven demodulators drops as the transmission distance increases. A higher modulation order negatively influences the accuracy for a given transmission distance. Among the three ML methods, the AdaBoost modulator achieves the best performance.