An ESPRIT-Based Approach for RF Fingerprint Estimation in Multi-Antenna OFDM Systems

Abstract

Estimation of radio frequency fingerprint (RFF) of a transmitter from the received signal is often affected by the wireless communication channel. The existing approaches mainly rely on the channel reciprocity to obtain the RFF. In this letter, we propose a novel method to extract the RFF from the received signal by estimating the signal parameters using the rotational invariance technique, which takes advantage of the multiple receiver antennas. We prove that the RFF estimation is independent of the wireless channel reciprocity. Numerical results show that the RFF can be accurately extracted from the received signal, and that the proposed algorithm has excellent performance.