Integration of Secure Key Generation and Data Encrypted Communication in Wireless Environment

Physical-layer secret key generation (SKG) provides high-level security for data encryption in wireless communications, using the shared unique channel state information between legal partners. Most of SKG schemes focused on only SKG itself, while the combination of SKG and encrypted data transmission using the generated secret keys needs to be explored. Here, we propose and demonstrate a secure wireless communication scheme, where SKG and encrypted data communication are integrated together. For SKG, the randomness originated from the input data is utilized to increase the effective key generation rate (KGR) up to 20.8Kb/s when the input data rate is 250Kb/s. Afterwards, the data is encrypted using the generated secret keys and advanced encryption standard (AES). The feasibility and robustness of the integrated system have been verified by the experimental results. Compared with the system where SKG and encrypted data communication are separated, the time required to transfer the same amount of data will be reduced by 48.04%.