Radio frequency fingerprint identification (RFFI) is a promising physical layer security technique that employs the hardware-introduced features extracted from the received signals for device identification. In this paper, we consider an RFFI problem in the presence of hybrid time-varying distortions (HTVDs) induced by multipath fading channel, carrier frequency offset (CFO), and phase offset. To solve this problem, an HTVDs-robust RFFI framework is proposed. Firstly, we derive that the residual HTVDs after CFO correction can be approximated as multiplicative interference in the frequency domain. Secondly, we define a novel signal analysis dimension named spectral quotient (SQ) representation and then present the spectral circular shift division (SCSD) method to generate the HTVDs-robust SQ signals, where the multiplicative interference can be suppressed. Thereafter, the statistics including root mean square (RMS), variance (VAR), skewness (SKE), and kurtosis (KUR) are extracted from the real and imaginary components of the SQ signals, respectively. Finally, the statistical features are used for the training and testing of the support vector machine (SVM) classifiers. To further enhance the performance of the proposed RFFI scheme, we also present the spectral circular multi-shift division (SCMSD) method, which increases the flexibility in the generation of the HTVDs-robust SQ signals. Given what we knew, this is the first time attempting to mitigate the HTVDs by leveraging the strong frequency correlation at the neighboring subcarriers in the multivariate hypothesis tasks. Compared to several handcraft feature-based RFFI methods, the proposed method exhibits superior identification accuracy and strong robustness. Experimental results show that the proposed RFFI scheme can achieve the accuracy of 91.3%with five devices and 86.4% with sixteen devices when the classifiers are trained with the additive white Gaussian noise but are tested with the Rayleigh channel.

Radio frequency fingerprint identification (RFFI) is a physical layer security methodology to recognize individual devices by leveraging hardware imperfections inevitably induced in the manufacturing process. However, the performance degradation caused by the time-varying channel impacts and interferences has severely restricted the development of RFFI. To this end, we present a channel-agnostic RFFI system, which consists of three modules, i.e., signal preprocessing module, feature extraction module, and classification module. In the signal preprocessing module, we first propose a novel approach, referred to as limiter-based spectral circular shift bidirectional division (LB-SCSBD), to generate two parallel spectral quotient (SQ) sequences. Then, we define the spectral quotient constellation (SQC) symbols according to different modulation formats, and thereby transform the SQ sequences into four magnitude-based sequences in terms of two channel-robust signal representations, i.e., the SQ magnitude (SQM) and SQC error vector magnitude (SQC-EVM). In the feature extraction module, we present a moment-based statistical feature extractor (MB-SFE) to extract the device-specific information from the above four sequences. In the classification module, the extracted statistics are fed into the multi-class support vector machine (SVM) for training and testing. We take WiFi as a case study and evaluate the performance of the proposed RFFI system by classifying eight simulated device models and six universal software radio peripheral (USRP) transmitter radios. Experimental results show that (i) the proposed method achieves the accuracies of 99.84% and 98.26% with eight devices in QPSK and 16QAM cases, as well as the accuracy of 92.42% with six USRP devices (ii) the proposed method exhibits superior classification performance in comparison to some existing RFFI methods, leading to a significant accuracy improvement of at least 38.33%.

Automatic modulation classification (AMC) is a crucial technique for the design of intelligent transceivers and has received considerable research attention. Conventional feature-based (FB) methods have the advantage of low computational complexity. However, these methods are highly sensitive to the distribution shifts of the received signal caused by the variation of channel effects and have rarely been studied in orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) systems under unseen synthetic channels with multipath fading effects, carrier frequency offset (CFO), phase offset (PO) and additive noise. To solve this problem, this paper proposes a novel FB method using the error vector magnitude (EVM) features for AMC tasks (termed as EVM-AMC), which can achieve reliable classification performance for the communication scenarios considering unseen synthetic channels in OFDM systems. Specifically, we first propose the axisymmetric mapping-based self-circulant differential division (AM-SCDD) algorithm to convert the received signal into the non-negative spectral quotient (NNSQ) sequence, deeply suppressing the synthetic channel effects. Subsequently, we derive the EVM features by analyzing the matched error vectors between the generated NNSQ sequence and the predefined NNSQ constellation symbol (NNSQCS) masks. During this process, a percentile-based filter is utilized to remove the outliers in each matched error vector. Finally, the feature samples collected from various channel conditions are sent to the multi-class support vector machine (SVM) classifiers for training and testing. Two candidate modulation type sets are employed to evaluate the performance of the proposed EVM-AMC method under both the constant and changing channel conditions. Our numerical results demonstrate that 1) the proposed method exhibits impressive robustness and generalization when dealing with unseen synthetic channels, 2) the proposed method yields the best classification performance when compared to the conventional FB AMC methods in the presence of channel effects.

Automatic modulation classification (AMC) is paramount within the Artificial Intelligence of Things (AIoT) realm for consumer electronics, offering advantages such as efficient spectrum utilization, heightened communication reliability and security, and an enhanced user experience. Addressing the challenges posed by variable signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) conditions, this paper introduces SEMIN (SNR-Enhanced Modulation Insight Network), a novel deep learning architecture aimed at significantly improving classification accuracy, particularly in high SNR scenarios. By integrating SNR-aware training and a unique combination of cross-entropy and center loss functions, SEMIN adeptly balances spatial and temporal feature extraction through convolutional neural networks (CNNs) and bidirectional gated recurrent units (BiGRUs). Comprehensive evaluations showcase the superior performance of the proposed SEMIN model, achieving an accuracy rate above 93% in high SNR conditions and surpassing existing methods. This outcome not only underscores the effectiveness of the proposed SEMIN model in modulation classification but also establishes a new benchmark for future research and application in relevant fields.

Automatic modulation classification (AMC) is one of the most crucial technologies for identifying the modulation formats of unknown wireless signals in cognitive radio. However, few works focus on collaborative AMC (Co-AMC) performance under unknown varying environments. Such differences of received signals under these conditions make it hard for the existing fusion strategies to exhibit their advantages, even probably leading to the performance degradation due to the inappropriate fusion. To address these issues, we design a signal-level Co-AMC framework, where an adaptive signal-level fusion (ASF) method is proposed to achieve high classification performance. The proposed ASF method is capable of generating the fused spectral quotient (FSQ) signal possessing the maximum signal-to-interference ratio (SIR). Furthermore, we construct the signal distribution property vector (SDPV) from the FSQ signal to concisely represent the modulation-related information. At last, the SDPVs are sent to a convolutional neural network (CNN) to accomplish the final classification. The simulations are conducted to prove that the proposed Co-AMC framework provides significant classification performance improvement compared to existing AMC methods under different scenarios.