Title
Design And Performance Analysis Of Channel Estimators Under Pilot Spoofing Attacks In Multiple-Antenna Systems
Abstract
In multiple antenna systems employing time-division duplexing, spatial precoder design at the base station (BS) leverages channel state information acquired through uplink pilot transmission, under the assumption of channel reciprocity. Malicious eavesdroppers can start pilot spoofing attacks to alter such design, in order to improve their eavesdropping performance in downlink. The aim of this paper is to study the effects of pilot spoofing attacks on uplink channel estimation, by assuming that the BS knows the angle of arrivals (AoAs) of the legitimate channels. Specifically, after assessing the performance of the simple least squares estimator (LSE), we consider more sophisticated estimators, such as the maximum likelihood estimator (MLE) and different versions of the minimum mean square error estimator (MMSEE), involving different degrees of a priori information about the pilot spoofing attacks. Theoretical analysis and numerical simulations are used to compare the performance of such estimators. In particular, we analytically demonstrate that the spoofing effects in the high signal-to-noise ratio regime can be completely suppressed, under certain conditions involving the AoAs of the legitimate and spoofing channels. Moreover, we show that even an imperfect knowledge of the AoAs and of the average transmission power of the spoofing signals allows the MLE and MMSEE to achieve significant performance gains over the LSE.
Year
DOI
Venue
2020
10.1109/TIFS.2020.2985548
IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON INFORMATION FORENSICS AND SECURITY
Keywords
DocType
Volume
Channel estimation, Maximum likelihood estimation, Uplink, Training, Downlink, Signal to noise ratio, Bayes methods, Array processing, channel estimation, least squares, maximum likelihood, minimum mean square error, multiple antenna systems, physical-layer security, pilot spoofing
Journal
15
ISSN
Citations 
PageRank 
1556-6013
1
0.35
References 
Authors
0
4
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Donatella Darsena118217.78
Giacinto Gelli221122.46
Ivan Iudice311.37
Francesco Verde425424.42