Title
Physical Layer Authentication for Mobile Systems with Time-Varying Carrier Frequency Offsets
Abstract
A novel physical layer authentication scheme is proposed in this paper by exploiting the time-varying carrier frequency offset (CFO) associated with each pair of wireless communications devices. In realistic scenarios, radio frequency oscillators in each transmitter-and-receiver pair always present device-dependent biases to the nominal oscillating frequency. The combination of these biases and mobility-induced Doppler shift, characterized as a time-varying CFO, can be used as a radiometric signature for wireless device authentication. In the proposed authentication scheme, the variable CFO values at different communication times are first estimated. Kalman filtering is then employed to predict the current value by tracking the past CFO variation, which is modeled as an autoregressive random process. To achieve the proposed authentication, the current CFO estimate is compared with the Kalman predicted CFO using hypothesis testing to determine whether the signal has followed a consistent CFO pattern. An adaptive CFO variation threshold is derived for device discrimination according to the signal-to-noise ratio and the Kalman prediction error. In addition, a software-defined radio (SDR) based prototype platform has been developed to validate the feasibility of using CFO for authentication. Simulation results further confirm the effectiveness of the proposed scheme in multipath fading channels.
Year
DOI
Venue
2014
10.1109/TCOMM.2014.032914.120921
IEEE Transactions on Communications
Keywords
Field
DocType
Authentication,Kalman filters,Estimation,Physical layer,Doppler shift,Wireless communication,Signal to noise ratio
Multipath propagation,Wireless,Authentication,Computer science,Carrier frequency offset,Signal-to-noise ratio,Electronic engineering,Kalman filter,Radio frequency,Physical layer
Journal
Volume
Issue
ISSN
62
5
0090-6778
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
22
0.92
19
Authors
4
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Weikun Hou1888.10
Xianbin Wang22365223.86
Jean-Yves Chouinard319826.37
Ahmed Refaey4598.44