Toward Intelligent Lightweight and Efficient UAV Identification With RF Fingerprinting
Zhenxin Cai, Yu Wang, Qi Jiang, Guan Gui, Jin Sha
Abstract
The inherent flexibility of small unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) enables their deployment across various emerging markets. Unauthenticated UAVs pose a significant threat if they intrude into aviation-sensitive areas. To address this issue, deep learning (DL)-based radio frequency fingerprint identification (RFFI) has been developed as a promising approach for identifying illegal UAVs. However, these commonly used DL-based methods demand high computation and storage requirements, which are not suitable for the deployment of RFFI. In this paper, we propose an efficient and low-complexity RFFI method for UAV identification. Specifically, we design a lightweight backbone network consisting of lightweight multi-scale convolution (LMSC) blocks that can significantly reduce the model size and enhance the feature extraction ability. The simulation results indicate that our proposed UAV RFFI method outperforms other state-of-the-art and popular DL-based RFFI methods in terms of both identification performance and complexity. The identification accuracy surpasses that of all other methods at low signal-to-noise ratios (SNRs) and achieves nearly 100% accuracy at high SNRs. To further enhance model efficiency, we employ data truncation in our experimental simulations, demonstrating that a sample length of 2000 is sufficient to retain high identification performance. Additionally, we incorporate the Mixup regularization strategy, which improves accuracy without increasing the complexity, especially as sample length decreases.