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

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.