Few‐shot cross‐receiver radio frequency fingerprinting identification based on feature separation

Abstract Radio frequency fingerprint identification (RFFI) is a widely used technique for authenticating equipment. It identifies transmitters by extracting hardware defects found in the RF front end. Recent research has focused on the impact of transmitters and wireless channels on radio frequency fingerprint (RFF). Most work is based on the same receiver assumption, while the influence of the receiver on RFF remains unresolved. This paper focuses on the impact of receiver hardware characteristics on RFF and proposes a few‐shot cross‐receiver RFFI method based on feature separation. Data augmentation with noise addition and simulated channels addresses sparse sample issues and enhances the model's robustness to channel variations. Simultaneously, feature separation is realized by reducing the correlation between transmitter and receiver features through classification loss and similarity loss. We evaluate the proposed approaches using a large‐scale WiFi dataset. It is shown that when a trained transmitter classifier is deployed on new receivers with only 30 samples per trained transmitter, the average identification accuracy of the proposed method is 83.6%. This accuracy is 9.45% higher than the baseline method without considering transmitter hardware influence. After fine‐tuning, the average identification accuracy can reach 98.25%.