Analysis of receiver front end on the performance of RF fingerprinting

Radio Frequency (RF) fingerprinting is a technique, where a transmitter is identified from its electromagnetic emission. Most existing RF fingerprinting techniques have been evaluated with high-end receivers and promising classification results have been reported in the literature. However, the realization of RF fingerprinting in todays low-end (i.e. low cost) portable devices requires the validation of the existing RF fingerprinting techniques with low-end receivers. This contribution analyzes the performance of RF fingerprinting for low-end receivers. Experiments are performed for three transmitters and signals are captured with one high-end receiver and three low-end receivers using Universal Software Radio Peripheral (USRP). It is found that the classification accuracy of RF fingerprinting varies for different low-end receivers. Results show that low-end receivers provide good classification results at high receiver SNR but high receiver SNR is rare in a typical wireless communication environment. Whereas high-end receiver performs well even at low SNR.