Supervised Contrastive Learning for RFF Identification With Limited Samples

Radio-frequency fingerprint (RFF), which comes from the imperfect hardware, is a potential feature to ensure the security of communication. With the development of deep learning (DL), DL-based RFF identification methods have made excellent and promising achievements. However, on one hand, existing DL-based methods require a large amount of samples for model training. On the other hand, the RFF identification method is generally less effective with limited amount of samples, while the auxiliary data set and the target data set often needs to have similar data distribution. To address the data-hungry problems in the absence of auxiliary data sets, in this article, we propose a supervised contrastive learning (SCL)-based RFF identification method using data augmentation and virtual adversarial training (VAT), which is called “SCACNN.” First, we analyze the causes of RFF, and model the RFF identification problem with augmented data set. A nonauxiliary data augmentation method is proposed to acquire an extended data set, which consists of rotation, flipping, adding Gaussian noise, and shifting. Second, a novel similarity radio-frequency fingerprinting encoder (SimRFE) is used to map the RFF signal to the feature coding space, which is based on the convolution, long short-term-memory, and a fully connected deep neural network (CLDNN). Finally, several secondary classifiers are employed to identify the RFF feature coding. The simulation results show that the proposed SCACNN has a greater identification ratio than the other classical RFF identification methods. Moreover, the identification ratio of the proposed SCACNN achieves an accuracy of 92.68% with only 5% samples.