Swarm intelligence based key generation for text encryption in cellular networks

Encryption of data traffic in cellular network is essential since it is vulnerable to eavesdropping. This paper focuses on encrypting the data sent between the mobile stations and base stations using a stream cipher method. However, the keys for encryption are generated using a swarm intelligence approach. Swarm intelligence is the emergent collective intelligence of groups of simple autonomous agents. The novel technique termed Ant Colony Key Generation Algorithm (AKGA) employs a character code table for encoding the keys. The advantage of this approach is that it reduces the number of keys to be stored and distributed. Experimental results demonstrating AKGApsilas encrypting text of different lengths and the comparison of its performance with other stream cipher methods are presented.