Optimizing energy-efficiency of PHY-Layer authentication in machine-to-machine networks

Security issues are gaining in importance for machine-to-machine (M2M) networks, mainly because thousands of devices are left unattended for years of operation without the possibility of human intervention. One of the most critical security issues is the prevention of denial of service (DoS) attacks, given the limited capabilities of the M2M devices and the wireless communication settings. To this end, we had earlier introduced a novel recursive PHY-Layer security scheme which was shown to yield enormous benefits with regards to DoS attacks [1]. Recognizing the importance of the thus required synchronization window and the possibility of desynchronization because of poor channel conditions, we introduce a novel synchronization process. For said process, we calculate the optimum synchronization window length taking error rates into account. The analysis allows minimizing energy expenditure and also quantifies the impact onto memory and CPU. The analysis is corroborated by simulations which confirm significant performance improvements.