Recent Advances in Circuits, Systems and Automatic Control

The Effect of Transient Detection Errors on RF Fingerprint

Classification Performance
MEMDUH KSE
SELUK TACIOLU
ZYA TELATAR
Computer Sciences Research and
Electrical and Electronics Engineering Department
Application Center
Faculty of Engineering
Ahi Evran University
Ankara University
TURKEY
TURKEY
memduh.kose@ahievran.edu.tr, selcuk.tascioglu@eng.ankara.edu.tr, ziya.telatar@ankara.edu.tr
Abstract: - Wireless devices exhibit some unique characteristics depending on their analog circuitry during
transmission. These characteristics can be observed from transients of transmitted signals and can be used to
generate fingerprints of devices for the purpose of wireless device identification. In this paper, the impact of
transient detection errors on an RF fingerprint-based identification system is investigated. Transient detection is
carried out by using Bayesian ramp change detector and the performance degradation of this detector due to
additive noise is analyzed. Two different RF fingerprints based on instantaneous amplitude responses of
transients are used to evaluate the classification performance.

Key-Words: -RF fingerprinting, wireless device identification, transient detection

characteristics of the channel noise and the transient
are different and the location of the change in the
fractal trajectory can be detected by setting a
threshold. One of the approaches to remove the
threshold requirement of this method was proposed
by [6], in which the change in the fractal trajectory
was detected using a Bayesian change-point
detection algorithm. In [7], a transient detection
method based on the instantaneous phase responses
was proposed. In this method, transient starting point
was estimated by using the characteristic differences
of phase variance of transient signal and noise. In [9],
an algorithm based on mean change point detection
was proposed for the detection of transient of WiFi
signals. The proposed method was analyzed in terms
of complexity and accuracy and was compared with
the methods in [5], [6], and [7]. In a recent work by
Yuan et al., a transient detection scheme utilizing the
complexity difference of noise and transient signals
was proposed [10]. The complexity of signals was
measured by using permutation entropy trajectory in
which a generalized likelihood ratio test detector was
employed to find the start of the transient.
Inaccurate detection of transient signals causes to
loose distinctive features, and therefore the
classification performance degrades. So far, the
effects of transient detection errors on RF
fingerprinting classification system have been
analyzed for different transient detection methods.
For example, in [2], the impact of noise on transient
detection schemes using variance trajectory of

1 Introduction
RF fingerprints of wireless devices are generated by
exploiting unique characteristics from transmitted
signals. The process of analyzing these
characteristics to identify wireless devices is called
RF fingerprinting. This process has been proposed
for security enhancement of wireless networks. RF
fingerprinting systems consist of data acquisition,
identification signal detection, feature extraction and
classification modules. For feature extraction,
different signal attributes such as instantaneous
amplitude, phase and frequency have been used and
several techniques have been employed in time [1],
spectral [2] and wavelet domain [3]. Features can be
obtained from different parts of the acquired radio
signals, such as turn-on transients, RF burst signals,
preambles, etc. When the related signal part is
obtained, feature extraction process is carried out and
RF fingerprints are created from these features.
Finally, a classifier is employed to distinguish the
fingerprints of different devices. A survey of RF
fingerprinting systems can be found in [4].
For an RF fingerprinting system utilizing turn-on
transient signals at feature extraction stage, transient
detection is a critical task for the reliability of
classification system. Several detection schemes
have been proposed for the transient detection
problem [5]-[10]. In [5], a multifractal segmentation
technique based on variance fractal dimension
trajectory was used to separate the transient signal
from channel noise. It was shown that multifractal

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instantaneous amplitude and instantaneous phase

responses was investigated. The impact of amplitudebased and phase-based transient detection errors on
classification performance is examined at different
SNR levels. It was shown that the performance of the
variance trajectory method using instantaneous phase
responses is unacceptable for IEEE 802.11a signals
even at high SNRs.
Klein et al. performed a sensitivity analysis for
burst detection and fingerprint classification method
at varying SNR conditions [11]. The effect of burst
transient detection error on classification
performance was examined for a multiple
discriminant analysis-maximum likelihood classifier.
The analysis was carried out for two transient
detection approaches in [6] and [7]. It was obtained
that the variance trajectory method [7] is superior to
the fractal-Bayesian step change detector [6] and the
results of the variance trajectory method are
consistent with the perfect burst detection
performance for high SNR levels. In order to improve
low SNR performance of variance trajectory
detector, a dual-tree complex wavelet transform
denoising process was introduced in [12]. In the same
study, it was demonstrated through experimental
results that introduced denoising process improves
both transient detection and classification
performance.
The impact of burst detection error on
classification performance was analyzed for time
domain and wavelet domain fingerprints in [3].
Classification performance of wavelet domain
fingerprints were obtained to be better than that of
time domain fingerprints in case of inaccurate
detection of transient. In the same study, it was
reported that burst detection error may be occurred
due to the operation of the equipment in non-ideal
environments or dissimilarity of the equipment used
for capturing training and test data.
In order to improve the classification performance
of a transmitter identification system in noisy
channels, a method based on noise injection into the
training data of the classifier was proposed in [13]. In
this method, training data was contaminated with the
noise whose amount was determined by the estimated
SNR of the test signal. Classification errors due to the
effect of additive channel noise on transient detection
and feature extraction stages were considered
together for a probabilistic neural network classifier.
Performance improvement was demonstrated
experimentally using data collected from VHF
transmitters.

ISBN: 978-1-61804-306-1

2 Bayesian Ramp Change Detection

Transient detection can be performed using
instantaneous amplitude responses of waveforms
collected from wireless devices. For a complex
valued baseband signal, instantaneous amplitude
response is defined as

A(i) I 2 (i) Q2 (i)

(1)

where I (i ) and Q (i ) stand for in-phase and

quadrature components of the sampled signal at time
instant i , respectively. In Fig.1, an instantaneous
amplitude response of a transmitted signal captured
from a WiFi device is shown. As seen from this
figure, it is not easy to separate the transient signal
from the channel noise exactly due to non-stationary
character of transient.

Fig.1. Instantaneous amplitude response of a

transmitted signal captured from a WiFi device
reten and Serinken have proposed a method
called Bayesian ramp change detection for transient
detection of WiFi signals using instantaneous
amplitudes [8]. In this method, transient detection
problem is considered as a change-point detection
problem. Instantaneous amplitude response is
modeled as

e(i ),
A(i )
(i m) e(i ),

if 1 i m
if m i N

(2)

where m is the change-point, is mean of data

before change-point, N is data length, is the ramp
slope, e is additive white Gaussian noise. Maximum
a posteriori estimate for the change-point is obtained
by calculating the posterior probability density with
uniform prior information assumption. As an
advantage, this method requires neither channel noise

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Recent Advances in Circuits, Systems and Automatic Control

variance knowledge nor the model parameters and

. For the details of the algorithm, see [8], in which
it was demonstrated that Bayesian ramp change
detector has high accuracy for IEEE 802.11b signals
at high SNR levels.

3 Bayesian Ramp Change Detector

Performance at Low SNR
The performance of the Bayesian ramp change
detector was evaluated using data collected from
eight different IEEE 802.11b devices. Data set
contains one hundred transmissions from each
device. In order to measure low SNR performance of
the detector, SNRs of the collected transients were
changed by adding noise. For a fixed SNR level,
recorded channel noise signals were added to the
collected transients to set the desired SNR level, and
then starting points of transients were estimated. This
process was repeated for one hundred recorded noise
signals. Estimation error for transient starting point is
defined as
m
Em

Fig.3. Histogram of transient starting point

estimation errors for Bayesian ramp change detector
The histogram of the transient starting point
estimation errors is demonstrated in Fig.3. Histogram
of errors concentrates around zeros at high SNR
levels whereas it spreads out as the SNR decreases.
This figure also shows that an increasing positive bias
in the estimate of transient starting point is induced
when the SNR is less than 10 dB.

(3)

and m are the estimated and the actual

where m
values of the start of the transient, respectively.
Actual starting locations of transients were
determined visually from the instantaneous
amplitude responses of the collected transient
signals. Mean squared error was calculated over 800
transients, each of which were contaminated by 100
different noise signals. MSE values of the Bayesian
ramp change detector at different SNR levels is
plotted in Fig.2, showing that the decrease in SNR
causes an increase in MSE. When the SNR level is
less than 10 dB, MSE increases dramatically.

4 The Effect of Transient Detection

Errors on Classification Performance
Classification is performed using a probabilistic
neural network (PNN). After selecting training and
test sets randomly, RF fingerprints are generated for
these sets. Two different RF fingerprints are
employed to evaluate classification performance. The
first fingerprint is taken as the instantaneous
amplitudes (IA) of transients and the second
fingerprint is formed from the features obtained by
principal component analysis (PCA) [1]. PCA is a
widely used dimension reduction and feature
extraction method which projects the data onto a
lower dimensional space so that the projected data
have maximum variance [14]. The directions of this
new space are defined as the eigenvectors of the data
covariance matrix, which are called principal
components. The number of principal components is
determined by different approaches. In a
classification problem, this number may be chosen so
as to achieve the best classification performance. In
[1], it was shown that classification performance of
RF fingerprints for WiFi devices remains the same
when five principal components of instantaneous
amplitude responses are used rather than using all
amplitude values. Therefore in this study, we
generated RF fingerprints using five principal
components.

Fig.2. Transient detection performance of Bayesian

ramp change detector at different SNR levels

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Additive noise affects the extracted features as

well as the estimations of transient starting points. In
this work, the aim is to evaluate the effect of transient
detection errors on classification performance.
Therefore the transients from which features will be
extracted are taken as the signals prior to noise
contamination.
The effect of transient detection errors on PNN
classification
performance
was
analyzed
experimentally using collected 802.11b transient
signals. 20% of all transients from each transmitter
were used as training set and remaining transients
were used as test set. Training and test sets were
selected randomly in each trial. 30 Monte Carlo trials
were performed, in each of the trial 30 different
recorded noise signals were added to the test signals.
Therefore a total of 900 classification results were
obtained at each SNR level. Fig.4 shows mean of
these classification results for each SNR. This figure
demonstrates that correct classification rate decreases
as the SNR decreases. Classification accuracy goes
below 0.8 when the SNR drops to about 10 dB. This

figure also shows that the effect of transient detection

errors has the same effect on the classification
performance of instantaneous amplitude and PCA
features for all SNR values in the interval [5, 20] dB.
Histograms of correct classification rates of PCA
features for the case that transient detection is
performed at two different SNR levels are given in
Fig.5.
In order to visualize the effect of transient
detection errors on the extracted features, two of the
principal components obtained from test transients
for the case that transient detection is performed at 20
dB and 8 dB are shown in Fig.6. This figure shows
that features spread out and overlap in the feature
space when the transient starting points are
incorrectly estimated. Note that only two of the five
features are given in this figure to partially visualize
the effect of transient detection errors on the
separability of PCA features. Overall classification
performance cannot be observed from this figure.

(a)
Fig.4. The effect of detection of transients at different
SNR levels on classification performance

(b)
Fig.5. Classification performance of PCA features for
the case that transient detection is performed at two
different SNR levels.

ISBN: 978-1-61804-306-1

Fig.6. Two principal components extracted from test

transients for the case that transient detection is
performed at (a) 20 dB and (b) 8 dB

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[6] O. Ureten and N. Serinken, Detection of radio

transmitter turn-on transients, Electronics
Letters, Vol. 35, No.23, 1999, pp. 19961997.
[7] J. Hall, M. Barbeau, E. Kranakis, Detection of
transient in radio frequency fingerprinting using
signal phase, IASTED International Conference
on Wireless and Optical Communications, 2003,
pp. 13-18.
[8] O. Ureten and N. Serinken, Bayesian detection
of Wi-Fi transmitter RF fingerprints, Electronics
Letters, Vol. 41, No.6, 2005, pp. 373-374.
[9] L. Huang, M. Gao, C. Zhao, X. Wu, Detection
of Wi-Fi transmitter transients using statistical
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Processing, Communication and Computing
(ICSPCC) , 2013, pp.1-5.
[10] Y.J. Yuan, X. Wang, Z.T. Huang, Z.C. Sha,
Detection of radio transient signal based on
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[11] R.W. Klein, M.A. Temple, M.J. Mendenhall,
D.R. Reising, Sensitivity analysis of burst
detection and RF fingerprinting classification
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Communications (ICC), 2009, pp. 1-5.
[12] R.W. Klein, M.A. Temple, M.J. Mendenhall,
Application of wavelet denoising to improve
OFDM-based
signal
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and
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[13] O.H. Tekbas, O. Ureten, N. Serinken,
Improvement of transmitter identification
system for low SNR transients, Electronics
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[14] C.M. Bishop, Pattern Recognition and Machine
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5 Conclusion
In this paper, the performance of Bayesian ramp
change transient detector is evaluated under varying
SNR conditions. It is shown experimentally, using
collected WiFi signals, that detection performance of
the detector degrades significantly when the transient
SNR is below 10 dB. The effect of transient detection
errors on the classification performance of RF
fingerprinting system is evaluated by using a
probabilistic neural network classifier. Classification
performance degradation with increasing transient
detection error is shown for two different RF
fingerprints based on instantaneous amplitude
responses.

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R.F. Mills, Using spectral fingerprints to
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