Orientation and Channel-Independent RF Fingerprinting for 5G IEEE 802.11ad Devices

Physical-layer fingerprinting is a promising technique to identify Internet of Things (IoT) devices. In this article, we investigate a new radio-frequency (RF) fingerprinting based on the distinctive signal-to-noise-ratio (SNR) trace in the sector-level sweep (SLS) procedure of 5G IEEE 802.11ad devices. This SLS SNR trace-based fingerprinting can directly apply to off-the-shelf devices without any extra hardware requirements and be independent of the wireless channel and environment. To tackle the impact of orientation on the RF fingerprinting, we propose a novel fingerprinting framework, involving correlation analysis, surface fitting, curve pursuing, and binary classification, named the CSCB framework. Using this framework, the proposed SLS SNR trace-based fingerprinting can achieve device authentication at any orientation with one receiver under line-of-sight (LOS) or non-LOS (NLOS) scenarios. We conduct proof-of-concept experiments using off-the-shelf IEEE 802.11ad devices (Talon AD7200 and MG360 WiGig) to evaluate the performance of the proposed fingerprinting schemes. Experimental results show the effectiveness of the proposed fingerprinting schemes where the verification accuracy of the proposed scheme can reach 99% with only 200 training samples.