Foundation Model for Wireless Technology Recognition Using IQ Timeseries

Abstract: Wireless Technology Recognition (WTR) is essential in modern communication systems, enabling efficient spectrum management and the seamless coexistence of diverse technologies. In real-world conditions, WTR solutions should be able to handle signals from various resources with different sampling rates, capturing devices, and frequency bands. However, traditional WTR methods, which rely on energy detection, Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) models, or Deep Learning (DL), lack the robustness and adaptability required to generalize across unseen environments, different sampling devices, and previously unencountered signal classes. In this work, we introduce a Transformer-based foundation model for WTR, trained in an unsupervised manner on large-scale, unlabeled wireless signal datasets. Foundation models are designed to learn general-purpose representations that transfer effectively across tasks and domains, allowing generalization towards new technologies and WTR sampling devices. Our approach leverages input patching for computational efficiency and incorporates a two-stage training pipeline: unsupervised pre-training followed by lightweight fine-tuning. This enables the model to generalize to new wireless technologies and environments using only a small number of labeled samples. Experimental results demonstrate that our model achieves superior accuracy across varying sampling rates and frequency bands while maintaining low computational complexity, supporting the vision of a reusable wireless foundation model adaptable to new technologies with minimal retraining.