Physical-Layer Authentication Using Multiple Channel-Based Features

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This paper concerns the problem of authenticating the transmitter without a secret key. In comparison with traditional cryptographic-based authentication mechanisms, the Physical-Layer Authentication (PLA) has the following advantages: high security, low complexity, and high compatibility, since it exploits intrinsic and unique features of the physical layer to authenticate the transmitter rather than using a secret key. The prior channel-based PLA schemes use a quantization algorithm to deal with multiple channel-based features for simplicity. However, there are two main limitations in the prior schemes: performance loss due to quantization error and the difficulty of obtaining the optimal thresholds in closed-form. In this paper, we propose two multiple Channel Impulse Response (CIR) based PLA schemes to effectively overcome the aforementioned limitations of the prior schemes. The first scheme uses multiple CIRs to realize the PLA, which is named as the Multiple CIRs PLA (MCP) scheme. The MCP scheme has better authentication performance than the prior schemes, since it avoids to use a quantization algorithm. The second scheme further improves the authentication performance by exploiting the channel correlation coefficient, which is named as the Enhanced Multiple CIRs PLA (EMCP) scheme. We provide rigorous performance analysis of two proposed schemes. We implemented the proposed schemes and conducted extensive performance comparisons through simulations. Our experimental results show that the closed-form expressions of the theoretical results of the proposed schemes perfectly match the corresponding simulation results. The EMCP scheme has the best authentication performance and the MCP scheme is the second one, whereas the prior scheme is the worst one. As the SNR or the channel correlation coefficient declines, the performance gap among various schemes gradually increases.