WhiteNet: Robust Identification of Overlapping IEEE 802.11 Signals Across Unseen Channels

Abstract

Deep learning (DL) classifiers trained on I/Q samples achieve high accuracy for IEEE 802.11 protocol identification of overlapping signals, but their performance degrades sharply when channel conditions at deployment differ from those encountered during training. We present WhiteNet, a framework that addresses the problem of channel variability in I/Q samples. The central idea is spectral whitening, a physics-grounded preprocessing step that suppresses frequency-selective fading while preserving protocol-discriminative features. To reduce dependence on costly multi-transmitter over-the-air captures for training, we complement it with a synthetic overlap mixer featuring a physically accurate per-transmitter channel and shared-receiver signal chain for pre-training without extensive field data collection. On public over-the-air IEEE 802.11 data, WhiteNet closes a substantial portion of the accuracy gap caused by unseen channel conditions while using 7.7 times fewer parameters than the prior state of the art, and optionally distills to compact variants for coarse spectrum awareness on power-constrained edge devices.