WideScan: Exploiting Out-of-Band Distortion for Device Classification Using Deep Learning

Wireless device classification techniques play a vital role in supporting spectrum awareness applications, such as spectrum access policy enforcement and unauthorized network access monitoring. Recent works proposed to exploit distortions in the transmitted signals caused by hardware impairments of the devices to provide device identification and classification using deep learning. As technology advances, the manufacturing impairment variations among devices become extremely insignificant, and hence the need for more sophisticated device classification techniques becomes inescapable. This paper proposes a scalable, RF data-driven deep learning-based device classification technique that efficiently classifies transmitting radios from a large pool of bit-similar, high-end, high-performance devices with same hardware, protocol, and/or software configurations. Unlike existing techniques, the novelty of the proposed approach lies in exploiting both the in-band and out-of-band distortion information, caused by inherent hardware impairments, to enable scalable and accurate device classification. Using convolutional neural network (CNN) model for classification, our results show that the proposed technique substantially outperforms conventional approaches in terms of both classification accuracy and learning times. In our experiments, the testing accuracy obtained under the proposed technique is about 96% whereas that obtained under the conventional approach is only about 50% when the devices exhibit very similar hardware impairments. The proposed technique can be implemented with minimum receiver design tuning, as radio technologies, such as cognitive radios, can easily allow for both in-band and out-of band sampling.