Generation of Secret Key for Physical Layer to Evaluate Channel Characteristics in Wireless Communications

TL;DR

This paper presents a method for generating secret keys from physical layer channel characteristics in wireless communications, comparing two schemes based on received signal strength and channel phase.

Contribution

It introduces and compares two PHY key generation schemes, analyzing their performance in real-time simulation environments for secure wireless communication.

Findings

Received-signal-strength-based scheme has lower key disagreement probability.

Channel-phase-based scheme offers higher key generation rate.

Both schemes have distinct advantages in scalability and implementation.

Abstract

This manuscript aims to generate a secret key for a PHY layer to evaluate the channel characteristics in wireless communications. An algorithmic approach is adopted for multimedia encryption to generate a secret key between two entities communicating with each other in a real time simulation environment such as MATLAB. Two classes of PHY key generation schemes are analyzed for designing the algorithm such as received-signal-strength-based and channel- phase-based protocols. We present a performance comparison of them in terms of key disagreement probability, key generation rate, key bit randomness, scalability, and implementation issues.