A Review of Radio Frequency Fingerprinting Methods Based on Raw I/Q and Deep Learning

Abstract

The hardware imperfection can generate a unique fingerprint of the trasmitter, and it is attached to the radio signal. The unique attribute of transmitter can be used for Radio Frequency Fingerprinting (RFF). Due to the unknown channel conditional and the lack of prior information such as modulation scheme, the traditional method of RFF faces huge challenges to non-cooperative conditions. On the contrary, RFF methods based on Deep Learning (DL), especially those that can directly process raw I/Q, show great potential. However, the research results of this direction are scattered, which seriously hinders researchers from grasping the key issues. This paper first classifies and compares the RFF methods based on DL according to the utilization of prior knowledge, and focuses on the RFF methods based on raw I/Q and DL. Then, this paper focuses on the classification and discussion of the deep neural network model of RFF using raw I/Q, and summarizes the open source data sets, data representation methods and data augmentation methods related to RFF. Finally, this paper discusses the difficulties and research directions of the RFF based on DL, hoping to help the research and application of the RFF.

Keywords

• radio frequency fingerprinting (rff)
• specifical emitter identification (sei)
• deep learning (dl)
• convolution neural network (cnn)
• geometric deep learning