Improving Quantization for Channel Reciprocity based Key Generation

Quantization, and the fact that channel characteristics are independent and identically distributed so far have received only little attention in reports about actual implementations of physical layer key generation schemes. They are merely assumed for channel reciprocity based key generation, although the secret key generation significantly relies on them.We set out to design a quantization preprocessing as well as an online quantization scheme which favours i.i.d. and uniform distribution of the generated values to achieve high entropy and key rates, and calculate the resulting mutual information between communication partners in a large, realistic measurement study. Our experiments indicate a remarkable increase in mutual information, and underline the applicability to various quantization and key generation schemes.