Enhanced Multiuser CSI-Based Physical Layer Authentication Based on Information Reconciliation
To address the insufficient robustness and excessive overhead of physical-layer authentication in low-power IoT multi-user scenarios, this paper proposes a channel state information (CSI)-based information reconciliation authentication scheme. The method innovatively incorporates the Slepian–Wolf distributed source coding principle into a time-varying multi-user CSI authentication framework, integrating adaptive quantization with polar codes to achieve efficient, low-overhead information reconciliation. Temporal alignment of multi-user channel measurements and variable-bit quantization further enhance authentication consistency and interference resilience. Experimental results demonstrate a detection probability exceeding 99.80% at an extremely low false alarm rate (<10⁻⁴), significantly outperforming existing approaches. This work establishes a new paradigm for highly reliable, cost-effective physical-layer authentication tailored to resource-constrained IoT deployments.