On Radio Frequency Fingerprint Identification for DSSS Systems in Low SNR Scenarios

Radio frequency fingerprint (RFF) is an intrinsic hardware characteristic and has been employed for device identification. Its application in low signal-to-noise-ratio (SNR) has never been explored because its identification performance is greatly affected by the received signal quality. This letter proposes a novel RFF identification scheme for spread spectrum systems in low SNR scenarios. In the scheme, a signal preprocessing method, information data estimation-based stacking algorithm, is proposed, which leverages the repeated spreading sequences and stacks them together to eliminate the noise and interference effect. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed scheme can achieve 98% identification rate when the received signal SNR is -15 dB and the length of spreading sequence is 1023.