Radio Frequency Fingerprinting Exploiting Non-Linear Memory Effect

Radio frequency fingerprint (RFF) identification distinguishes wireless transmitters by exploiting their hardware imperfection that is inherent in typical radio frequency (RF) front ends. This can reduce the risks for the identities of legitimate devices being copied, or forged, which can also occur in conventional software-based identification systems. This paper analyzes the feasibility of device identification exploiting the unique non-linear memory effect of the transmitter RF chains consisting of matched pulse shaping filters and non-linear power amplifiers (PAs). This unique feature can be extracted from the received distorted constellation diagrams (CDs) with the help of image recognition-based classification algorithms. In order to validate the performance of the proposed RFF approach, experiments are carried out in cabled and over the air (OTA) scenarios. In the cabled experiment, the average classification accuracy among systems of 8 PAs (4 PAs of the same model and the other 4 of different models) is around 92% at signal to noise ratio (SNR) of 10 dB. For the OTA line-of-sight (LOS) scenario, the average classification accuracy is 90% at SNR of 10 dB; for the non-line-of-sight (NLOS) scenario, the average classification accuracy is 79% at SNR of 12 dB

Radio frequency fingerprint collaborative intelligent identification using incremental learning

For distributed sensor systems using neural networks, each sub-network has a different electromagnetic environment, and these recognition accuracy is also different. In this paper, we propose a distributed sensor system using incremental learning to solve the problem of radio frequency fingerprint identification. First, the intelligent representation of the received signal is linearly fused into a four-channel image. Then, convolutional neural network is trained by using the existing data to obtain the preliminary model of the network, and decision fusion is used to solve the problem in the distributed system. Finally, using new data, instead of retraining the model, we employ incremental learning by fine-tuning the preliminary model. The proposed method can significantly reduce the training time and is adaptive to streaming data. Extensive experiments show that the proposed method is computationally efficient, and also has satisfactory recognition accuracy, especially at low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) regime