Using autoencoders for radio signal denoising

We investigated the use of a Deep Learning approach to radio signal de-noising. This data-driven approach has does not require explicit use of expert knowledge to set up the parameters of the denoising procedure and grants great flexibility across many channel conditions. The core component used in this work is a Convolutional De-noising AutoEncoder, known to be very effective in image processing. The key of our approach consists in transforming the radio signal into a representation suitable to the CDAE: we transform the time-domain signal into a 2D signal using the Short Time Fourier Transform. We report about the performance of the approach in preamble denoising across protocols of the IEEE 802.11 family, studied using simulation data. This approach could be used within a machine learning pipeline: the denoised data can be fed to a protocol classifier. A perspective advantage of using the AutoEncoders in that pipeline is that they can be co-trained with the downstream classifier, to optimize the classification accuracy.