The analysis of RF fingerprinting for low-end wireless receivers with application to IEEE 802.11a

RF fingerprinting is proposed to provide an additional layer of security for Wireless devices. The unique RF fingerprint can be used to establish the identity of a specific wireless transmitter in order to prevent masquerading/impersonation attacks. The existing RF fingerprinting techniques are mostly analyzed with high-end receivers, which are built with expensive analog components. However, low-end receivers built with inexpensive components have its own limitation and impairments. This paper has analyzed the classification performance of RF fingerprinting and its feasibility for low-end receivers. Universal Software Radio Peripheral (USRP) is used as low-end receiver and its performance is compared with high-end receiver, which consists of expensive spectrum analyzer and Oscilloscope. Results have shown that classification accuracy of different low-end receivers varies for a specific transmitter and credible results can be achieved at high SNR while the classification accuracy of high-end receiver is high even at low SNR.