Transmitter Identification via Volterra Series Based Radio Frequency Fingerprint

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel RF fingerprinting method using Volterra series to model hardware-induced distortions, enabling accurate transmitter identification with improved interpretability and robustness across channel conditions.

Contribution

It develops a Volterra series-based feature extraction approach for RF fingerprinting, enhancing interpretability and generalization over existing methods.

Findings

Achieves over 98% accuracy in static channels

Maintains above 90% accuracy under multipath and Doppler effects

Provides a more interpretable hardware representation

Abstract

The growing number of wireless devices increases the need for secure network access. Radio Frequency Fingerprinting (RFF), a physical-layer authentication method, offers a promising solution as it requires no cryptography and resists spoofing. However, existing RFF approaches often lack a unified theory and effective feature extraction. Many methods use handcrafted signal features or direct neural network classification, leading to limited generalization and interpretability. In this work, we model the transmitter as a black box and analyze its impact on transmitted signals. By treating the deviation from an ideal signal as hardware-induced distortion, we represent the received signal using a Volterra series, using its kernels to capture linear and nonlinear hardware traits. To manage the high dimensionality of these kernels, we approximate them via wavelet decomposition and estimate coefficients through least-squares fitting. The resulting wavelet coefficients provide compact yet informative hardware representations, which are classified using a complex-valued neural network. Experiments on a public LoRa dataset show state-of-the-art performance, with over 98% accuracy in static channels and above 90% under multipath and Doppler effects. The proposed approach improves both interpretability and generalization across varying channel conditions.