RF Fingerprinting of IoT Devices Based on Transient Energy Spectrum

Abstract

Radio frequency (RF) fingerprinting is considered as one of the promising techniques to enhance wireless security in the Internet of Things (IoT) applications. In this paper, a low-complexity RF fingerprinting method for classification of wireless IoT devices is proposed. The method is based on the energy spectrum of the transmitter turn-on transient signals from which unique characteristics of wireless devices are extracted. The number of spectral components to be used is determined through a proposed approach based on the estimated transient duration value. Transient duration estimation is achieved from the smoothed versions of the instantaneous amplitude characteristics of transmitter signals, which are obtained through a sliding window averaging method. Classification performance of the proposed spectral fingerprints is assessed using experimental data and described by a confusion matrix. The discrimination effectiveness of the spectral fingerprints is quantified by a class separability criterion and evaluated for different noise levels through Monte Carlo simulations. It is demonstrated that the proposed fingerprints outperform the classification performance of two existing fingerprints especially at low signal-to-noise ratio. Additionally, computational complexity analysis of the classifier using the proposed fingerprints is provided.