Enhanced Radio Frequency Fingerprint Identification Using Length-Robust Representation and Incremental Learning

Radio frequency fingerprinting identification (RFFI) leverages signal processing to extract unique characteristics from wireless signals for device identification. In recent years, deep learning (DL) has significantly advanced signal identification, catalyzing progress in RFFI research. This article proposes an enhanced RFFI method to manage variable-length signal inputs, typically problematic for neural networks, such as convolutional neural networks (CNNs) and multilayer perceptrons (MLPs), by treating these signals as images to solve data formatting problems. The robust representation of the variable-length signal ultimately achieves over 90% accuracy, meeting the expected results. Furthermore, conventional DL-based RFFI methods require a comprehensive analysis of the entire RF signal, consuming significant computational resources and vulnerable to environmental variations. We address these issues by proposing an incremental learning (IL)-based RFFI method that allows dynamic model updates and improves recognition and generalization performance. Our method’s efficacy, tested on the power amplifiers (PA) dataset, enables real-time data stream processing.