Research Article

A physical layer secret key consistency enhancement scheme using constellation decision information

PLA Strategic Support Force Information Engineering University, Zhengzhou, 450001, China

^* Corresponding author (e-mail: liangjin@263.net

Received: 30 April 2023
Revised: 14 October 2023
Accepted: 10 November 2023

Abstract

Secret key generation based on a wireless channel (WC-SKG) is a promising solution to address the security issues in wireless communication. However, the consistency of channel estimation between two legal communication nodes in WC-SKG is often poor due to the receiver noise, signal power, etc., leading to a low secret key generation rate (SKGR). Although there are several denoising algorithms such as orthogonal transformation to address this issue, existing schemes overlook the fact that data symbols are also affected by the channel. This results in existing schemes only using the pilot symbols for channel estimation and not fully utilizing the received signal power of the WC-SKG. To address this issue, we propose a consistency enhancement algorithm based on constellation decision information (CEA-CDI), which utilizes both pilot symbols and soft decision information of data symbols to improve SKGR. Monte Carlo simulation and numerical results demonstrate that our proposed scheme can improve performance by approximately 16 dB compared to initial channel estimation.