Dynamic open set specific emitter identification via multi‐channel reconstructive discriminant network

Abstract Specific emitter identification (SEI) is an emerging device authentication technology, which depends on the inherent hardware characteristics of wireless devices. By analysing the received signal, the hardware characteristics of a specific emitter can be extracted at the receiver and used for device authentication and association. Most of the existing SEI schemes focus on the identification under closed sets. In view of the explosive growth of the number of IoT devices, based on generative adversarial networks, this study proposes a method that considers the identification of unknown emitters. The reconstruction network to reconstruct the signals of the known class and fully train the feature space of the signals of the known class is designed. In the discriminator, two channels are specifically designed to perform anomaly detection for unknown signals and end‐to‐end closed‐set classification for known signals. In order to better reject unknown signals and accept known signals, Receiver operating characteristic curve and Youden index are used to determine the optimal threshold for anomaly detection. Under the given optimal threshold conditions, the identified threshold points have larger True Positive Rate. In addition, the time‐frequency feature combination vector is designed to reveal the essential characteristics of emitters. The experimental results on the real‐world datasets collected from universal software radio peripherals in short‐range communication scenario show that compared with the existing open‐set recognition methods such as C2AE, Openmax and SoftMax, the average recognition accuracy of the proposed framework improved by 0.08, 0.15, and 0.2 respectively, and the Marco‐F1 score improved by 0.05, 0.1, and 0.16, respectively, which proves the superiority of the proposed framework. In addition to identifying unknown and known Universal software radio peripherals in this article, some potential and widespread applications of the proposed framework include access user security authentication in IoT, such as Hack RF and Blue tooth devices. In addition, as a relatively general signal processing framework, the model can be used for air safety management and maritime ship identity authentication in civil aspects. In the military aspect, it can be used in electronic support and various signal reconnaissance scenarios, such as automatic signal modulation recognition in open set scenarios, individual identity determination of radar emitter and unknown working state identification of transmitters, which proves reference for subsequent research on open‐set signal recognition.