Unintentional modulation evaluation in time domain and frequency domain

Abstract

With the development of wireless communication technology, the electromagnetic environment has become more and more complex. Conventional signal identification methods are difficult to accurately identify illegal devices. However, electromagnetic signals have an unavoidable device-specific characteristic unintentionally generated by a transmitter, appearing in the form of an UnIntentional Modulation (UIM), namely Radio Frequency Fingerprint (RFF). RFFs can be used to uniquely identify an emitter to match a received signal with its source. In this paper, the authors propose a novel RFF scheme to separate UIM part from the original signals from the time and frequency domain, and then utilize non-Gaussian measuring tools to extract a set of dimension-reduced secondary features. Additionally, Singular Value Reconstruction (SVR) is developed to extract UIM in the frequency spectrum. In time domain, a curve-fitting residual method is proposed to extract the UIM on the estimated instantaneous phase based on Maximum Likelihood Estimator (MLE). Various aspects of the proposed method are evaluated, including identification accuracy under various Signal-to-Noise Ratio (SNR) conditions, energy relationships between the UIM and the whole signal, and sensitivity to training set size. Compared with other methods, experimental results based on real-world signals prove that the proposed method has remarkable performance and high practicability.