Wireless Transmitter Identification Based on Device Imperfections

Mining useful patterns from databases is an important research topic. The research in utility mining mostly focuses on discovering patterns of high value in large databases, and analyzing the important factors in a data mining process. This idea is applied to the wireless device identification in this paper. Radio Frequency Fingerprint (RFF) reflects differences between transmitter hardware components. It contains rich non-linear characteristics of the internal components of the transmitter. Small differences and inaccuracies in the manufacturing process determine the unique characteristic contained in the transmitted signal. The device can be identified by the signal transmitted by the wireless device. In this paper, the generation mechanism of RFF is analyzed and two pattern mining algorithms are used to extract useful information from wireless signals for device identification. Then, a real communication transmitter link is established to study the effect of different components of a transmitter. The signals are acquired from the transmitters with different components replaced, including the amplifier, the bandpass filter, and the local oscillator. Finally, the influence of different components and pattern mining methods are evaluated.