Secret Key Generation Rate With Power Allocation in Relay-Based LTE-A Networks

Long-term evolution-advanced (LTE-A) networks exploit low-power relay nodes, picocells and femtocells to boost throughput, enhance coverage, decrease latency, and reduce cost. End users in a relay-based LTE-A network can recruit relay nodes to cooperate as virtual antenna arrays, thereby reaping the benefits offered by multiple input single output (MIMO) techniques. Although the relay-based cooperative MIMO (coop MIMO) implementation in LTE-A networks improves performance, security issues are often overlooked. This paper introduces a physical layer security scheme for point-to-point networks, and extends this scheme to MIMO networks. Two practical relay-based coop MIMO architectures and corresponding secret key generation (SKG) schemes are presented. For both the MIMO and coop MIMO networks, the impact of proposed power allocation on SKG rate (SKGR) is quantified via the theoretical and numerical analysis. Results indicate that the proposed power allocation scheme can offer 15%–30% increase in SKGR relative to MIMO/coop MIMO networks with equal power allocation at low-power region, thereby improving network security.