Complementary authenticator design for ground control station to identify Unmanned Aerial Vehicles based on channel-tap power

This work proposes a novel authentication method for identifying Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) based on a channel-tap power. A ground control station utilized the channel-tap power as a radio-frequency fingerprint (RFF) to directly detect UAVs via physical (PHY) layer. The proposed authentication method uses the Neyman-Pearson test to discriminate between two UAVs, UAVI and UAVA, which are controlled by the ground control station. The proposed methods helps the ground control station completely detect UAVI and UAVA using PHY layer. Finally, the performances are analyzed, and simulations are conducted to evaluate the performance of the proposed authenticator. From simulation results, for SNR = −5 dB and the false alarm probability of 0.2, the ground control station can detect the UAV with the detection probability of 0.90 under the UAV speed of 70 km/h.