A Reliable Physical Layer Authentication Algorithm for Massive IoT Systems

As the request for network access and a variety of services, the Internet of Things (IoT) has evolved from special networks with simple functions to global information infrastructure, challenging the current authentication mechanism. Due to the dense population in the massive IoT scenario, the increasing connectivity requirements may aggravate the load of the authentication entity and increase the corresponding processing delay, which may further jeopardize the service and affect the quality of the experience. To solve this problem, especially for the case in which the authentication infrastructure is unavailable, a physical layer authentication method is proposed in this paper, which is based on modified physical authentication flow, a modified PDA algorithm based on soft information, and authentication key randomization based on hash mapping. Through Monte Carlo simulations, it is observed that the proposed physical layer authentication mechanism shows a favorable gain compared with that of the existing methods.