Cross-domain, Scalable, and Interpretable RF Device Fingerprinting

Tianya Zhao, Xuyu Wang, Shiwen Mao

Abstract: In this paper, we propose a cross-domain, scalable, and interpretable radio frequency (RF) fingerprinting system using a modified prototypical network (PTN) and an explanation-guided data augmentation across various domains and datasets with only a few samples. Specifically, a convolutional neural network is employed as the feature extractor of the PTN to extract RF fingerprint features. The predictions are made by comparing the similarity between prototypes and feature embedding vectors. To further improve the system performance, we design a customized loss function and deploy an eXplainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) method to guide data augmentation during fine-tuning. To evaluate the effectiveness of our system in addressing domain shift and scalability problems, we conducted extensive experiments in both cross-domain and novel-device scenarios. Our study shows that our approach achieves exceptional performance in the cross-domain case, exhibiting an accuracy improvement of approximately 80% compared to convolutional neural networks in the best case. Furthermore, our approach demonstrates promising results in the novel-device case across different datasets. Our customized loss function and XAI-guided data augmentation can further improve authentication accuracy to a certain degree.