Constellation-Heterogeneity-Based Group Physical-Layer Authentication for Non-Coherent Massive MIMO Systems

Physical layer authentication (PLA) is an important approach to improve the security of Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT). However, channel-based PLA for a large number of resource-constrained wireless devices is impractical due to the complex industrial environment. Hence, a novel group-oriented authentication strategy based on collaborative tag embedding is proposed in this letter for the non-coherent massive MIMO systems. In the proposed strategy, multiple devices collaboratively transmit signals to a base station using a group of well-designed constellations, and meanwhile are authenticated as a whole, where the tag is embedded in the dynamic pattern-selections of the heterogeneous constellation groups. At the base station, the tag is firstly estimated through the constellation pattern detection, and then the PLA is performed by comparing the estimated tag with the pre-shared one. This proposed constellation-heterogeneity-based group PLA (CHT-PLA) scheme effectively leverages cooperative transmission among multiple users, thereby further enhancing authentication reliability. Theoretical analysis and numerical simulations demonstrate that the CHT-PLA scheme achieves better overall reliability performance compared with existing schemes.