Cost-Effective RF Fingerprinting Based on Hybrid CVNN-RF Classifier with Automated Multi-Dimensional Early-Exit Strategy

While the Internet of Things (IoT) technology is booming and offers huge opportunities for information exchange, it also faces unprecedented security challenges. As an important complement to the physical layer security technologies for IoT, radio frequency fingerprinting (RFF) is of great interest due to its difficulty in counterfeiting. Recently, many machine learning (ML)-based RFF algorithms have emerged. In particular, deep learning (DL) has shown great benefits in automatically extracting complex and subtle features from raw data with high classification accuracy. However, DL algorithms face the computational cost problem as the difficulty of the RFF task and the size of the DNN have increased dramatically. To address the above challenge, this paper proposes a novel costeffective early-exit neural network consisting of a complex-valued neural network (CVNN) backbone with multiple random forest branches, called hybrid CVNN-RF. Unlike conventional studies that use a single fixed DL model to process all RF samples, our hybrid CVNN-RF considers differences in the recognition difficulty of RF samples and introduces an early-exit mechanism to dynamically process the samples. When processing "easy" samples that can be well classified with high confidence, the hybrid CVNN-RF can end early at the random forest branch to reduce computational cost. Conversely, subsequent network layers will be activated to ensure accuracy. To further improve the early-exit rate, an automated multi-dimensional early-exit strategy is proposed to achieve scheduling control from multiple dimensions within the network depth and classification category. Finally, our experiments on the public ADS-B dataset show that the proposed algorithm can reduce the computational cost by 83% while improving the accuracy by 1.6% under a classification task with 100 categories.

One-Bit Channel Estimation for IRS-aided Millimeter-Wave Massive MU-MISO System

Recently, intelligent reflecting surface (IRS)-assisted communication has gained considerable attention due to its advantage in extending the coverage and compensating the path loss with low-cost passive metasurface. This paper considers the uplink channel estimation for IRS-aided multiuser massive MISO communications with one-bit ADCs at the base station (BS). The use of one-bit ADC is impelled by the low-cost and power efficient implementation of massive antennas techniques. However, the passiveness of IRS and the lack of signal level information after one-bit quantization make the IRS channel estimation challenging. To tackle this problem, we exploit the structured sparsity of the user-IRS-BS cascaded channels and develop three channel estimators, each of which utilizes the structured sparsity at different levels. Specifically, the first estimator exploits the elementwise sparsity of the cascaded channel and employs the sparse Bayesian learning (SBL) to infer the channel responses via the type-II maximum likelihood (ML) estimation. However, due to the one-bit quantization, the type-II ML in general is intractable. As such, a variational expectation-maximization (EM) algorithm is custom-derived to iteratively compute an ML solution. The second estimator utilizes the common row-structured sparsity induced by the IRS-to-BS channel shared among the users, and develops another type-II ML solution via the block SBL (BSBL) and the variational EM. To further improve the performance of BSBL, a third two-stage estimator is proposed, which can utilize both the common row-structured sparsity and the column-structured sparsity arising from the limited scattering around the users. Simulation results show that the more diverse structured sparsity is exploited, the better estimation performance is achieved, and that the proposed estimators are superior to state-of-the-art one-bit estimators.