Channel-Based Collaborative Authentication Scheme for Wireless Sensor Network

As the broadcast nature of wireless communications, information security becomes a more challenging issue in contrast to traditional wired channels especially for capabilities limited wireless sensor networks. On the other hand, we can exploit the randomness of wireless channels to authenticate devices by comparing their channel properties. In this paper, we proposed a performance enhanced physical layer authentication scheme for wireless sensor networks by collaboration of multiple sink nodes. A binary hypothesis testing based authentication method is proposed to identify nodes by directly comparing the current and previous channel frequency responses to decide whether the transmitter is malicious node or the legitimate node. Besides, we collaboratively integrate the decisions of different sink nodes to improve the authentication performance. The simulation results show that our proposed collaborative authentication scheme improves detection performance greatly.