Carrier Leakage Estimation Method for Cross-Receiver Specific Emitter Identification

Abstract

Specific emitter identification (SEI) technology uses fingerprint features originated from the emitter imperfections to identify the transmitting devices. However, the fingerprint features used in SEI are subtle and can be easily affected by the distortion of the receivers. This means that the features cannot be used universally among different receivers, which can bring many limits in identification but is rarely concerned in previous studies. To resolve this problem, the effects of receiver distortions on I/Q modulator fingerprints are discussed, and a carrier leakage estimation method for cross-receiver SEI is developed. In the proposed method, joint estimation of carrier leakage and filter distortions is included to eliminate the influence of the receiver. In the simulation and experiment, the performance of the proposed method and the traditional method is compared. The results validate that the proposed method can effectively reduce the feature offset caused by receiver distortions and the proposed method has the same effectiveness as the traditional one. The proposed method can be widely used in cross-receiver specific emitter identification.

Keywords

• Carrier leakage
• radio frequency fingerprint
• receiver distortions
• specific emitter identification