Initial Satellite Access Authentication Based on Doppler Frequency Shift

The future mobile system shall be able to support satellite access to provide an ubiquitous wireless connection service. Satellite communication is vulnerable to spoofing attacks due to the open nature of wireless channels, especially for the downlink satellite system information signalling (SIS) which has not been authenticated yet before initial access. SIS spoofing attacks would cause interferences as well as access failures or even denial of services (DoS) to the legitimate users. Thanks to the knowledge of satellite ephemeris as well as the global navigation satellite system (GNSS), Doppler frequency shift as an available physical attribute can be exploited to identify the source of SIS before the random access procedure. A physical layer authentication (PLA) approach based on Doppler frequency shift is proposed to determine whether the received SIS is from the legitimate communication satellite. Simulations show that the performance of the proposed method outperforms the channel state information (CSI) based PLA scheme.