LTE Device Radio Frequency Fingerprints Blind Extraction Based on Temporal-Frequency Domain PRACH Signals

Abstract

A frequency-domain cepstrum correlation and temporal transient filtered radio frequency fingerprints (RFF) blind extraction method is proposed for long term evolution uplink device authentication in this work. With the merits of the constant-modulus nature of the Zadoff-Chu (ZC) sequence and the cyclic prefix (CP) structure of the physical random access channel (PRACH) frame, the device RFF integrated in both the frequency-domain ZC sequence and the transient ramp-on/ramp-off sequences are extracted. For the frequency-domain RFF extraction, the cepstrum of the ZC sequence is calculated to enlarge the gap between the constant RFF and the random fading effects, and the correlation between two cepstrum fragments is then calculated to mitigate the random fading components. For the temporal RFF extraction, the ramp-on and ramp-off features induced by the device-specific power amplifier are extracted by exploiting the CP structure of the PRACH frame, where the CP part and the duplicate part are adaptively filtered and the final adapted weight of the least mean square filter is used as RFF. No prior PRACH parameter knowledge is required in RFF extraction and both the frequency-domain and the temporal RFF are combined as the input of the convolutional neural network to enhance the classification accuracy. With four-months sampling of PRACH signals emitted from universal software radio peripheral devices, the experimental results show that the authentication accuracy of the proposed combined RFF can reach as high as 99.9% in the line-of-sight (LOS) scenario and 99.6% in the non-LOS scenario.