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Specific Emitter Identification for Communications Transmitter Using Multi-measurements

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Abstract

Specific emitter identification (SEI) designates the unique transmitter of a given signal, using only external feature measurements called the RF fingerprints of the signal. SEI is often used in military and civilian spectrum-management operations. The SEI technique has also been applied to enhance the security of wireless network, such as VHF radio networks, Wi-Fi networks, cognitive radios, and cellular networks and so on. According to the state of a given signal, SEI techniques can be split into two groups, namely transient signal techniques and steady state signal techniques. Owing to several challenges, transient signal techniques may be limited in practice. On the contrary, steady state signal techniques are more practical. In this paper, a SEI method belonging to steady state signal techniques is proposed. The method works based on the actual signal’s inherent nonlinear dynamical characteristics. Firstly, several measurements are acquired from the given signal. Secondly, permutation entropy is utilized to extract the nonlinear dynamical characteristics of these measurements as the signal’s RF fingerprint to identify the unique transmitter. DSSS-QPSK signals from WLAN cards, OFDM-BPSK, OFDM-16QAM, DSSS-CCK4b and DSSS-DQPSK signals from digital radios are used to evaluate the performance of the proposed method. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method is effective.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. College of Electronic Science and Engineering, National University of Defense Technology, Changsha, Hunan, 410073, People’s Republic of China

    Guangquan Huang, Xiang Wang & Zhitao Huang

  2. Academy of National Defense Information, Wuhan, Hubei, 430010, People’s Republic of China

    Yingjun Yuan

Authors
  1. Guangquan Huang
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  2. Yingjun Yuan
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  3. Xiang Wang
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  4. Zhitao Huang
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Correspondence to Guangquan Huang.

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Huang, G., Yuan, Y., Wang, X. et al. Specific Emitter Identification for Communications Transmitter Using Multi-measurements. Wireless Pers Commun 94, 1523–1542 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11277-016-3696-8

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11277-016-3696-8

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