  User authentication in future wireless communication networks is expected to
become more complicated due to their large scale and heterogeneity.
Furthermore, the computational complexity of classical cryptographic approaches
based on public key distribution can be a limiting factor for using in simple,
low-end Internet of things (IoT) devices. This paper proposes physical layer
authentication (PLA) expected to complement existing traditional approaches,
e.g., in multi-factor authentication protocols. The precision and consistency
of PLA is impacted because of random variations of wireless channel
realizations between different time slots, which can impair authentication
performance. In order to address this, a method based on error-correcting codes
in the form of reconciliation is considered in this work. In particular, we
adopt distributed source coding (Slepian-Wolf) reconciliation using polar codes
to reconcile channel measurements spread in time. Hypothesis testing is then
applied to the reconciled vectors to accept or reject the device as
authenticated. Simulation results show that the proposed PLA using
reconciliation outperforms prior schemes even in low signal-to-noise ratio
scenarios.
