Specific Emitter Identification (SEI) is the association of a received signal to an emitter, and is made possible by the unique and unintentional characteristics an emitter imparts onto each transmission, known as its radio frequency (RF) fingerprint. SEI systems are of vital importance to the military for applications such as early warning systems, emitter tracking, and emitter location. More recently, cognitive radio systems have started making use of SEI systems to enforce Dynamic Spectrum Access (DSA) rules. The use of pre-determined and expert defined signal features to characterize the RF fingerprint of emitters of interest limits current state-of-the-art SEI systems in numerous ways. Recent work in RF Machine Learning (RFML) and Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) has shown the capability to perform signal processing tasks such as modulation classification, without the need for pre-defined expert features. Given this success, the work presented in this thesis investigates the ability to use CNNs, in place of a traditional expert-defined feature extraction process, to improve upon traditional SEI systems, by developing and analyzing two distinct approaches for performing SEI using CNNs. Neither approach assumes a priori knowledge of the emitters of interest. Further, both approaches use only raw IQ data as input, and are designed to be easily tuned or modified for new operating environments. Results show CNNs can be used to both estimate expert-defined features and to learn emitter-specific features to effectively identify emitters. / Master of Science / When a device sends a signal, it unintentionally modifies the signal due to small variations and imperfections in the device’s hardware. These modifications, which are typically called the device’s radio frequency (RF) fingerprint, are unique to each device, and, generally, are independent of the data contained within the signal.
The goal of a Specific Emitter Identification (SEI) system is to use these RF fingerprints to match received signals to the devices, or emitters, which sent the given signals. SEI systems are often used for military applications, and, more recently, have been used to help make more efficient use of the highly congested RF spectrum.
Traditional state-of-the-art SEI systems detect the RF fingerprint embedded in each received signal by extracting one or more features from the signal. These features have been defined by experts in the field, and are determined ahead of time, in order to best capture the RF fingerprints of the emitters the system will likely encounter. However, this use of pre-determined expert features in traditional SEI systems limits the system in a variety of ways.
The work presented in this thesis investigates the ability to use Machine Learning (ML) techniques in place of the typically used expert-defined feature extraction processes, in order to improve upon traditional SEI systems. More specifically, in this thesis, two distinct approaches for performing SEI using Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) are developed and evaluated. These approaches are designed to have no knowledge of the emitters they may encounter and to be easily modified, unlike traditional SEI systems
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:VTETD/oai:vtechworks.lib.vt.edu:10919/83532 |
| Date | 12 June 2018 |
| Creators | Wong, Lauren J. |
| Contributors | Electrical Engineering, Michaels, Alan J., Huang, Jia-Bin, Headley, William C., Beex, Aloysius A. |
| Publisher | Virginia Tech |
| Source Sets | Virginia Tech Theses and Dissertation |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis |
| Format | ETD, application/pdf |
| Rights | In Copyright, http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/ |
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