RF fingerprint extraction from the energy envelope of an instantaneous transient signal

RF fingerprinting is a technique, where a transmitter is identified from its electromagnetic emission. Most existing RF fingerprinting techniques require high sampling rates. This paper introduces a novel technique, which is effective at low sampling rates. This make RF fingerprinting more practical for resource constrained devices such as mobile transceivers. The technique is demonstrated with Bluetooth transceivers. A data acquisition system is designed to capture the Bluetooth signals in the 2.4GHz ISM band. A Spectrogram utilizing the Short Time Fourier Transform is used to obtain the energy envelope of the instantaneous transient signal and unique features are extracted from the envelope. The technique adopted for identification of the Bluetooth transmitters has shown promising results as compared to the reported techniques in the literature and have accurately classified the Bluetooth transmitters at low sampling rates.