Enhancing Specific Emitter Identification: A Semi-Supervised Approach With Deep Cloud and Broad Edge Integration

Published: 01 Jan 2025, Last Modified: 15 May 2025IEEE Trans. Inf. Forensics Secur. 2025EveryoneRevisionsBibTeXCC BY-SA 4.0
Abstract: Specific emitter identification (SEI) is crucial in the Internet of Everything (IoE). Over the past decade, deep learning (DL) and broad learning (BL)-enabled SEI technologies have emerged. Both DL- and BL-based SEI methods rely on extensive radio frequency (RF) signal samples and corresponding labels, but labeling unknown signals is a considerable overhead and costly task. Consequently, many researchers have begun exploring semi-supervised learning techniques to address the semi-supervised SEI (SS-SEI) problem with limited labeled RF signals. However, existing SS-SEI solutions often prioritize identification performance, leading to high computational overheads and lacking iterability and scalability. To overcome these challenges, this paper proposes a novel SS-SEI solution, termed deep cloud and broad edge (DCBE). This approach integrates a DL-based SEI method at the cloud server with an updatable BL-based SEI method at the edge node. Initially, several DL-based SEI models are trained using labeled historical data at the cloud server. Meanwhile, an updatable BL-based SEI method is deployed locally on the edge node to identify unlabelled signals. When the DCBE solution is operational, edge nodes capture real-time unlabelled RF signals. The pre-trained DL-based SEI method and the locally BL-based SEI method jointly identify these RF signals. The identification results, along with the new real-time RF signals, are then used to update the weights of the BL-based SEI method at the edge nodes. The DCBE SS-SEI solution is validated using an open-source, large-scale, real-world automatic dependent surveillance-broadcast (ADS-B) dataset. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed DCBE solution offers significant advantages in terms of SS-SEI performance, reduced computational overhead without GPU dependency, and system robustness in complex environments.
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