An electronic fingerprint makes it possible to identify a wireless device by its radio transmission characteristics.
Such systems are used in military signals intelligence and by radio regulatory agencies such as the U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC) for identifying illegal transmitters.
They are also used for assessing usage for billing purposes in Subscriber Mobile Radio (SMR) systems.
This topic has garnered great attention in recent years as the radio fingerprinting technique offers a "physical layer" authentication solution, which can provide fundamentally superior performance than traditional higher-layer encryption solutions.
The topic has been studied by various researchers across multiple disciplines, including Signal Processing, Antenna and Propagation and Computer Science.