Complementary authenticator design for ground control station to identify Unmanned Aerial Vehicles based on channel-tap power

Abstract

This work proposes a novel authentication method for identifying Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) based on a channel-tap power. A ground control station utilized the channel-tap power as a radio-frequency fingerprint (RFF) to directly detect UAVs via physical (PHY) layer. The proposed authentication method uses the Neyman-Pearson test to discriminate between two UAVs, UAV I and UAV A , which are controlled by the ground control station. The proposed methods helps the ground control station completely detect UAV I and UAV A using PHY layer. Finally, the performances are analyzed, and simulations are conducted to evaluate the performance of the proposed authenticator. From simulation results, for SNR = −5 dB and the false alarm probability of 0.2, the ground control station can detect the UAV with the detection probability of 0.90 under the UAV speed of 70 km/h.