Specific Emitter Identification is the association of a received signal to a unique emitter, and is made possible by the naturally occurring and unintentional characteristics an emitter imparts onto each transmission, known as its radio frequency fingerprint. This work presents an approach for identifying emitters using Convolutional Neural Networks to estimate the IQ imbalance parameters of each emitter, using only raw IQ data as input. Because an emitter's IQ imbalance parameters will not change as it changes modulation schemes, the proposed approach has the ability to track emitters, even as they change modulation scheme. The performance of the developed approach is evaluated using simulated quadrature amplitude modulation and phaseshift keying signals, and the impact of signal-to-noise ratio, imbalance value, and modulation scheme are considered. Further, the developed approach is shown to outperform a comparable feature-based approach, while making fewer assumptions and using less data.
Transfer learning is a pervasive technology in computer vision and natural language processing fields, yielding exponential performance improvements by leveraging prior knowledge gained from data with different distributions. However, while recent works seek to mature machine learning and deep learning techniques in applications related to wireless communications, a field loosely termed radio frequency machine learning, few have demonstrated the use of transfer learning techniques for yielding performance gains, improved generalization, or to address concerns of training data costs. With modifications to existing transfer learning taxonomies constructed to support transfer learning in other modalities, this paper presents a tailored taxonomy for radio frequency applications, yielding a consistent framework that can be used to compare and contrast existing and future works. This work offers such a taxonomy, discusses the small body of existing works in transfer learning for radio frequency machine learning, and outlines directions where future research is needed to mature the field.
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