PHY-Layer Authentication with Hardware Impairments in UAV-Aided Communication Systems

This paper studies a two-dimensional physical layer (PHY-layer) authentication scheme based on carrier frequency offset (CFO) and phase noise (PHN) to counteract the identity spoofing attack launched by illegitimate unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) in UAV-aided communication systems. Particularly, we first adopt the expectation conditional maximization (ECM) and extended Kalman filtering (EKF) methods to extract fingerprints from the received signals. Then, we formulate the problem of PHY-layer authentication as a binary hypothesis testing. Moreover, we theoretically derive the analytical expressions for the false alarm and detection probabilities based on the statistical analysis. Finally, extensive numerical simulations demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed scheme and validate the correctness of the developed theoretical models.