PMI-based MIMO OFDM PHY Integrated Key Exchange (P-MOPI) Scheme

Abstract

In the literature, J.-P. Cheng et al. have proposed the MIMO-OFDM PHY integrated (MOPI) scheme for achieving physical-layer security in practice without using any cryptographic ciphers. The MOPI scheme uses channel sounding and physical-layer network coding (PNC) to prevent eavesdroppers from learning the channel state information (CSI). Nevertheless, due to the use of multiple antennas for PNC at transmitter and beamforming at receiver, it is not possible to have spatial multiplexing nor use space-time codes in our previous MOPI scheme. In this paper, we propose a variant of the MOPI scheme, called P-MOPI, that works with a cryptographic cipher and utilizes precoding matrix index (PMI) as an efficient key-exchange mechanism. With channel sounding, the PMI is only known between the transmitter and the legal receiver. The shared key can then be used, e.g., as the seed to generate pseudo random bit sequences for securing subsequent transmissions using a stream cipher. By applying the same techniques at independent subcarriers of the OFDM system, the P-MOPI scheme easily allows two communicating parties to exchange over 100 secret bits. As a result, not only secure communication but also the MIMO gain can be guaranteed by using the P-MOPI scheme.