Physical layer secure key generation with nonlinear preprocessing of RSS for power constraint wireless networks

Abstract

SummaryThere has been growing attention in physical layer security (PLS) techniques for wireless networks. PLS techniques are based on physical layer characteristics and are less computationally complex than traditional cryptographic approaches, which work on higher layers of networks. Physical layer key generation (PLKG) is one of the prominent key based PLS techniques that exploits reciprocity and randomness of wireless fading channel to establish secure communication between two transceivers. PLKG system consists of five stages as RSS measurement, its preprocessing, quantization and encoding, key reconciliation, and privacy amplification. Each stage has a substantial role in deciding the performance of PLKG system, but RSS preprocessing offers wide scope in performance improvement for the system. In this work, we propose PLKG system using a new class of preprocessing technique first time, which is nonlinear. We formulated the problem uniquely and considered two nonlinear techniques: nonlinear preprocessing using expander (NLPE) and nonlinear preprocessing using compressor (NLPC). We analyzed the performance of system using NLPE and NLPC and found NLPE is most suitable. Performance of the system is evaluated in terms of bit disagreement rate (BDR) and randomness of keys. Results show that NLPE performs extremely well, as compared with linear approach and without preprocessing approach, especially at low signal to noise ratio (SNR) range. Emerging wireless networks such as internet of things (IoT), centralized radio access network (CRAN), wireless sensor network (WSN), and so forth are being operated at lower transmission power with lightweight hardware. Hence, for such type of power constraint networks, proposed PLKG system with NLPE can be proven a perfect security solution.