Physical layer aided authentication and key agreement for the Internet of things

In this paper, we propose a physical layer aided authentication and key agreement (PL-AKA) protocol for massive Internet of things (IoT) scenarios. Conventional AKA protocols such as evolved packet system AKA used in long-term evolution (LTE) systems may suffer from congestions in core networks by the large signaling overhead as the number of IoT devices increases. In order to reduce the signaling overhead, the physical layer challenge response authentication is employed in the proposed PL-AKA so that the IoT devices can be locally authenticated in a base station. Through theoretical analysis and numerical simulation, we demonstrate that the proposed protocol significantly reduces the signaling overhead while maintaining competitive authentication performance by taking advantage of both physical layer authentication and cryptography-based authentication.