A Novel Semi-Supervised Learning Framework for Specific Emitter Identification

Specific emitter identification (SEI) is developed as a potential technology against attackers in cognitive radio networks and authenticate devices in Internet of Things (IoT). It refers to a process to discriminate individual emitters from each other by analyzing extracted characteristics from given radio signals. Due to the strong capability of deep learning (DL) in extracting the hidden features of data and making classification decision, deep neural networks (DNNs) have been widely used in the SEI. Considering the insufficiently labeled training dataset and large unlabeled training dataset, we propose a novel SEI method using semi-supervised (SS) learning framework, i.e., metric-adversarial training (MAT). Specifically, two object functions (i.e., cross-entropy (CE) loss combined with deep metric learning (DML) and CE loss combined with virtual adversarial training (VAT)) and an alternating optimization way are designed to extract discriminative and generalized semantic features of radio signals. The proposed MAT-based SS-SEI method is evaluated on an open source large-scale real-world automatic-dependent surveillance-broadcast (ADS-B) dataset. The simulation results show that the proposed method achieves a better identification performance than four latest SS-SEI methods.