Estimation of the Secret Key Rate in Wideband Wireless Physical-Layer-Security
Marco Zoli, Miroslav Mitev, André Noll Barreto, Gerhard Fettweis
Abstract
In this work we investigate the problem of secret key generation (SKG) between two communicating wireless devices, according to the physical-layer security paradigm. We propose a general framework for any communication channel or waveform. In details, we study a filterbank-based method, which allows the generation of secret security keys from a wideband radio channel, independently from the baseband modem implementation. We believe that channel awareness is of utmost importance to understand the applicability of SKG methods, i.e., knowing their secret bit-rate under different channel scenarios. For that purpose, we investigate the SKG performance by means of Monte Carlo simulations that collect radio channel statistics and obtain the SKG performance through mutual information numerical estimation.