Performance enhancement of I/Q imbalance based wireless device authentication through collaboration of multiple receivers

I/Q imbalance commonly exists in direct conversion architecture based wireless transceivers due to the mismatches of analog components between in-phase (I) and quadrature (Q) branches. In this paper, the device-dependent I/Q imbalance is utilized as transmitter fingerprint to accomplish improved wireless authentication through the collaboration of multiple receivers. In precise, two hypothesis testing based authentication methods are proposed to identify transmitter by using an I/Q imbalance related matrix. To enhance the authentication performance of these two methods, a multi-receiver collaboration scheme is proposed in our study. Simulation results validate our proposed authentication scheme and show a significant enhancement comparing to the scenario without receiver collaboration.