A Jamming-Resilient MAC-layer Device Identification for Internet of Things

TL;DR

This paper proposes a simple, beep-based device identification protocol for IoT that is resilient to interference and can distinguish individual devices by their unique beep timing patterns.

Contribution

It introduces a novel beeping protocol leveraging temporal correlations for device identification in IoT, resilient to interference, without requiring complex modulation or decoding.

Findings

Protocol effectively identifies devices under interference

Uses temporal beep patterns as device fingerprints

Resilient to random interference and simple to implement

Abstract

In a number of practical scenarios a wireless device needs to mark its presence, for instance, to some access point. That enables the access point to assign the device its transmission slot or update the count of the network nodes. Many protocols can achieve exactly this result. In this paper, our goal is to show how that can be done in the simplest messaging model, the so-called beeping model. Consequently, we constrain our design so that the station does not send any modulated information in the signal and the receiver actually does not need to demodulate/decode it. We are interested in sending just a short signal, so called 'beep'. Moreover, we want to design such protocol that is resilient to random interference and enables us to identify devices which are sending the signal, as opposed to only note their presence. To do that, we leverage temporal correlations of a sequence of beeps issued by a device, as if the time-moments when they happen come from a pre-defined probability distribution, that is the fingerpring of the device.