Resource Allocation for Secret Key Agreement Over Parallel Channels With Full and Partial Eavesdropper CSI

Abstract

We consider the distillation phase of the secret key agreement (SKA) channel model for users connected through parallel additive white Gaussian noise fading channels. Alice sends binary phase shift keying modulated random bits to Bob who selects the subset of bits that have a log-likelihood ratio higher than a given threshold, i.e., they are sufficiently reliable. Alice has either full or partial channel state information (CSI) on her channel to the eavesdropper Eve. The main contributions of this paper are: 1) the derivation of the expression of outage probability when partial CSI is available; 2) the introduction of (outage) secret key throughput (SKT) as a metric in the full (partial) CSI scenario; 3) the derivation of SKT bounds; 4) the proposal of a new power allocation and threshold choice algorithm that maximizes the SKT under an outage probability constraint; and 5) the derivation of a suboptimal version of the allocation algorithm amenable for practical implementation obtained by approximating the objective functions with a closed-form expression. Moreover, we show that when power allocation and thresholds are optimized, per-channel and joint SKA are equivalent.