Specific transmitter identification (SEI) is a technology that uses a received signal to identify to which individual radiation source the transmitted signal belongs. It can complete the identification of the signal transmitter in a non-cooperative scenario. Therefore, there are broad application prospects in the field of wireless-communication-network security, spectral resource management, and military battlefield-target communication countermeasures. This article demodulates and reconstructs a digital modulation signal to obtain a signal without modulator distortion and power-amplifier nonlinearity. Comparing the reconstructed signal with the actual received signal, the coefficient representation of the nonlinearity of the power amplifier and the distortion of the modulator can be obtained, and these coefficients can be used as the fingerprint characteristics of different transmitters through a convolutional neural network (CNN) to complete the identification of specific transmitters. The existing SEI strategy for changing the modulation parameters of a test signal is to mix part of the test signal with the training signal so that the classifier can learn the signal of which the modulation parameter was changed. This method is still data-oriented and cannot process signals for which the classifier has not been trained. It has certain limitations in practical applications. We compared the fingerprint features extracted by the method in this study with the fingerprint features extracted by the bispectral method. When SNR < 20 dB, the recognition accuracy of the bispectral method dropped rapidly. The method in this paper still achieved 86% recognition accuracy when SNR = 0 dB. When the carrier frequency of the test signal was changed, the bispectral feature failed, and the proposed method could still achieve a recognition accuracy of about 70%. When changing the test-signal baud rate, the proposed method could still achieve a classification accuracy rate of more than 70% for four different individual radiation sources when SNR = 0 dB.
Keywords: convolutional neural network; modulator distortion; power-amplifier nonlinearity; specific emitter identification.