Multisource Heterogeneous Specific Emitter Identification Using Attention Mechanism-Based RFF Fusion Method

Cyber security has always been an important issue in the Internet of Everything topic. In the physical layer of the Internet, specific emitter identification (SEI) technology is widely researched as a simple and effective intrusion prevention technology. Existing SEI research only focused on radio frequency (RF) signals from a single receiver. However, in real scenes such as the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT), vehicle-to-everything applications, and intelligent sensing systems, etc., RF signals are received from different types of sensors deployed at different locations. Therefore, this paper proposes a multisource heterogeneous SEI (MH-SEI) method and proposes a multi-source heterogeneous attention-based feature fusion network (MHAFFN) to achieve excellent identification performance. The proposed MHAFFN utilizes a multi-channel convolutional network as the RF fingerprinting (RFF) extraction module for multisource heterogeneous RF signals and equips an attention-based RFF fusion module to obtain mixed RFF for the automatic classifier. The experimental results show that the identification accuracy of MHAFFN is 99.196% in a perfect environment. Furthermore, robustness verification has proved that MHAFFN keeps advantages in noisy environments. Through fault tolerance mechanism verification experiment, it is proved that MHAFFN is able to work stably in real-world complex scenarios.