A Generic Machine Learning Framework for Radio Frequency Fingerprinting

Abstract: Fingerprinting Radio Frequency (RF) emitters typically involves finding unique emitter characteristics that are featured in their transmitted signals. These fingerprints are nuanced but sufficiently detailed, motivating the pursuit of methods that can successfully extract them. The most granular downstream task is known as Specific Emitter Identification (SEI), which requires a well informed RF fingerprinting (RFF) approach for it to be successful. RFF and SEI have a long history, with numerous application areas in defence and civilian contexts such as signal intelligence, electronic surveillance, physical-layer authentication of wireless communication devices, to name a few. RFF methods also support many other downstream tasks such as Emitter Data Association (EDA) and RF Emitter Clustering (RFEC) and are applicable to a range of transmission types. In recent years, data-driven approaches have become popular in the RFF domain due to their ability to automatically learn intricate fingerprints from raw data. These methods generally deliver superior performance when compared to traditional techniques. The more traditional approaches are often labour-intensive, inflexible and only applicable to a particular emitter type or transmission scheme. Therefore, we consider data-driven Machine Learning (ML)-enabled RFF. In particular, we propose a generic framework for ML-enabled RFF which is inclusive of several popular downstream tasks such as SEI, EDA and RFEC. Each task is formulated as a RF fingerprint-dependent task. A variety of use cases using real RF datasets are presented here to demonstrate the framework for a range of tasks and application areas, such as spaceborne surveillance, signal intelligence and countering drones.