Toward Robust Radio Frequency Fingerprint Identification: A Federated Learning Framework With Feature Alignment

Abstract

With the growing adoption of Internet of Things (IoT) devices, ensuring the security of wireless communications has become increasingly critical. Radio frequency fingerprint identification (RFFI) has shown promise in this regard due to its capability of uniquely identifying devices. Although deep learning (DL) approaches have significantly improved RFFI performance, they typically rely on large-scale centralized data. This poses challenges in terms of privacy preservation and heterogeneous data distributions. To address the performance degradation caused by non-independent and identically distributed (non-IID) data in cross-receiver scenarios, this paper proposes a feature alignment strategy based on federated learning (FL) for RFFI. In such scenarios, due to differences in receiver hardware characteristics, deployment locations, and channel conditions, the signals captured by different receivers often exhibit distribution shifts, resulting in misaligned feature spaces across clients. The proposed method guides each client to learn aligned intermediate feature representations during local training, effectively mitigating the resulting adverse impact on model generalization. Experiments conducted on a real-world RF dataset demonstrate that the proposed method achieves higher identification accuracy and improved stability compared with representative federated baselines, including FedAvg and FedProx. The highest identification accuracy reaches 90.83%, and the performance gains are accompanied by generally reduced variance across different client configurations, highlighting the robustness and generalization capability of the proposed approach in heterogeneous wireless environments.