Performance Analysis of Modular RF Front End for RF Fingerprinting of Bluetooth Devices

Abstract

Radio frequency fingerprinting (RFF) could provide an efficient solution to address the security issues in wireless networks. The data acquisition system constitutes an important part of RFF. In this context, this paper presents an implementation of a modular RF front end system to be used in data acquisition for RFF. Modularity of the system provides flexible implementation options to suit diverse frequency bands with different applications. Moreover, the system is able to collect data by means of any digitizer, and enable to record the data at lower frequencies. Therefore, proposed RF front end system becomes a low-cost alternative to existing devices used in data acquisition. In its implementation, Bluetooth (BT) signals were used. Initially, transients of BT signals were detected by utilizing a large number of BT devices (smartphones). From the detected transients, distinctive signal features were extracted. Then, support vector machine (SVM) and neural networks (NN) classifiers were implemented to the extracted features for evaluating the feasibility of proposed system in RFF. As a result, 96.9% and 96.5% classification accuracies on BT devices have been demonstrated for SVM and NN classifiers respectively.