Channel Impulse Response-based Distributed Physical Layer Authentication

Abstract: In this preliminary work, we study the problem of {\it distributed} authentication in wireless networks. Specifically, we consider a system where multiple Bob (sensor) nodes listen to a channel and report their {\it correlated} measurements to a Fusion Center (FC) which makes the ultimate authentication decision. For the feature-based authentication at the FC, channel impulse response has been utilized as the device fingerprint. Additionally, the {\it correlated} measurements by the Bob nodes allow us to invoke Compressed sensing to significantly reduce the reporting overhead to the FC. Numerical results show that: i) the detection performance of the FC is superior to that of a single Bob-node, ii) compressed sensing leads to at least $20\%$ overhead reduction on the reporting channel at the expense of a small ($<1$ dB) SNR margin to achieve the same detection performance.