Channel Impulse Response-Based Distributed Physical Layer Authentication

In this preliminary work, we study the problem of distributed authentication in wireless networks. Specifically, we consider a system where multiple Bob (sensor) nodes listen to a channel and report their 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 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.