The analysis of RF fingerprinting for low-end wireless receivers with application to IEEE 802.11a
Saeed Ur Rehman, Kevin W. Sowerby, Colin Coghill, Wayne S. Holmes · 2012
RF fingerprinting is proposed to provide an additional layer of security for Wireless devices. The unique RF fingerprint can be used to establish the identity of a specific wireless transmitter in order to prevent masquerading/impersonation attacks. The existing RF fingerprinting techniques are mostly analyzed with high-end receivers, which are built with expensive analog components. However, low-end receivers built with inexpensive components have its own limitation and impairments. This paper has analyzed the classification performance of RF fingerprinting and its feasibility for low-end receivers. Universal Software Radio Peripheral (USRP) is used as low-end receiver and its performance is compared with high-end receiver, which consists of expensive spectrum analyzer and Oscilloscope. Results have shown that classification accuracy of different low-end receivers varies for a specific transmitter and credible results can be achieved at high SNR while the classification accuracy of high-end receiver is high even at low SNR.