Identifying and analyzing wireless network protocols without demodulation

Abstract

In the past few decades, wireless networks based on different standards have been developed quickly, and the coexistence of multiple communication systems has turned into reality. Due to the need for mobile computing or pervasive computing, quick and accurate protocol identification and analysis technology is required. Rather than employing the traditional demodulation-based method that requires to implement all known protocol modules in one single device, in this paper, we fully analyze the features in both time domain and frequency domain of physical (PHY) layer signals that can be used to describe a protocol, and present a new method of identifying and analyzing protocols without demodulation, which uses PHY layer signals only. This method can be used in battlefield and other situations where demodulation is impractical. To validate the feasibility of our method, we implement a system using GNU Radio and Universal Software Radio Peripheral (USRP). The results show that the system can successfully identify three different signals (including Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and Zigbee signals) with frequency domain features, and detect the period of beacons in Wi-Fi networks with the help of time domain features.