Radio signals show characteristics of minute differences, which result from various idiosyncratic hardware properties between different radio emitters. A robust detector based on exponentially weighted distances is proposed to detect the exact reference instants of the burst communication signals. Based on the exact detection of the reference instant, in which the radio emitter finishes the power-up ramp and enters the first symbol of its preamble, the features of the radio fingerprint can be extracted from the transient signal section and the steady-state signal section for radiometric identification. Experiments on real data sets demonstrate that the proposed method not only has a higher accuracy that outperforms correlation-based detection, but also a better robustness against noise. The comparison results of different detectors for radiometric identification indicate that the proposed detector can improve the classification accuracy of radiometric identification.

Radio signals show small characteristic differences between radio transmitters resulted from their idiosyncratic hardware properties. Based on the parameters estimation of transmitter imperfections, a novel radiometric identification method is presented in this letter. The fingerprint features of the radio are extracted from the mismatches of the modulator and the nonlinearity of the power amplifier, and used to train a support vector machine classifier to identify the class label of a new data. Experiments on real data sets demonstrate the validation of this method.