Physical-Layer Authentication in Wirelessly Powered Communication Networks

Abstract

This paper addresses the problem of authenticating the transmitter device in wirelessly powered communications networks (WPCNs). We proposed a physical-layer authentication scheme for a WPCN. In comparison with upper-layer authentication schemes, the proposed scheme has low complexity, low power consumption, low overhead, and high security. For comprehensively analyzing the performance of the proposed scheme by considering the requirements of transmission delay, security, and reliability together, we put forward an analytical framework by considering the probabilities of transmission, security outage, connection outage, and joint security-connection outage. Based on the proposed analytical framework, we further introduced a new systematic metric by calculating the achievable throughput of all users with considering the performance of transmission-delay, security, and reliability together. We defined this new systematic metric as the overall transmission efficiency (OTE) of a WPCN, which can effectively quantize the average efficiency of message transmission in the WPCN with physical layer authentication. We analyzed the events represented by these probability factors over random fading channels and explicitly derive their closed-form expressions. For defending against jamming attacks, we further proposed another metric to estimate which user has the high probability of suffering from jamming attacks. The new metric represents that the adversary has the largest attacking gain with the minimum cost. We implemented our scheme and conducted extensive performance comparisons through simulations. Our experimental results show that the proposed scheme accurately detects an impersonating attack and drops its contribution to the sum of long-term throughput.