Physical-Layer Authentication via Series Cancellation

Tag-based physical-layer authentication (PLA) is gaining widespread attention due to its high security and low latency. However, the message interference introduced by decoding errors during tag estimation significantly degrades the authentication performance. To address this issue, this paper proposes a robust series cancellation authentication (SCA) scheme, which can estimate the tag without decoding errors by superimposing series signals. Specifically, both the series signal generation and the series signal cancellation modules are carefully designed to generate authentication signals and estimate tags, respectively. The closed-form expressions for tag detection at Bob and authentication process detection at Eve are derived, which theoretically reveal that the proposed scheme can obtain the perfect authentication performance. Numerical results show that the proposed SCA scheme outperforms the benchmark in terms of the detection probability.