A Novel Radio Frequency Fingerprint Identification Method Using Incremental Learning

Radio frequency fingerprint (RFF) is regarded as a key technology in physical layer security in various wireless communications systems. Deep learning (DL) has achieved great success in the field of signal identification, particularly in improving performance and eliminating manual feature extraction. However, the training cost of these DL-based methods is usually large. It is unwise to retrain the network with whole data when it comes to new data. Therefore, we propose a novel RFF identification method based on incremental learning (IL), which uses continuous data stream to update the identification model, constantly. Experimental results show that with the increase of increment times, the accuracy of the proposed IL-based method gradually approaches the performance of joint training, and finally reaches 96.79%, which is only 1.9% lower than the performance upper bound.