Design of a Hybrid RF Fingerprint Extraction and Device Classification Scheme

Radio frequency (RF) fingerprint is the inherent hardware characteristics and has been employed to classify and identify wireless devices in many Internet of Things applications. This paper extracts novel RF fingerprint features, designs a hybrid and adaptive classification scheme adjusting to the environment conditions, and carries out extensive experiments to evaluate the performance. In particular, four modulation features, namely differential constellation trace figure, carrier frequency offset, modulation offset and I/Q offset extracted from constellation trace figure, are employed. The feature weights under different channel conditions are calculated at the training stage. These features are combined smartly with the weights selected according to the estimated signal to noise ratio at the classification stage. We construct a testbed using universal software radio peripheral platform as the receiver and 54 ZigBee nodes as the candidate devices to be classified, which are the most ZigBee devices ever tested. Extensive experiments are carried out to evaluate the classification performance under different channel conditions, namely line-of-sight (LOS) and nonline-of-sight scenarios. We then validate the robustness by carrying out the classification process 18 months after the training, which is the longest time gap. We also use a different receiver platform for classification for the first time. The classification error rate is as low as 0.048 in LOS scenario, and 0.1105 even when a different receiver is used for classification 18 months after the training. Our hybrid classification scheme has thus been demonstrated effective in classifying a large amount of ZigBee devices.