Power Allocation and Beam Scheduling for Multi-User Massive MIMO Secret Key Generation

Secret key generation in multi-user massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) communication suffers from high computation complexity, pilot overhead, and inter-user interference caused by the large dimension of the massive MIMO channel. To address these problems, this paper proposes a novel key generation approach that exploits the beam domain channel for channel feature extraction. The proposed approach can effectively reduce the channel feature dimension and mitigate the inter-user interference, via the well-designed power allocation and beam scheduling algorithms. Specifically, the multi-user key generation model is built and the design problem of channel feature extraction matrices is formulated as a sum key rate maximization problem. To tackle this problem, we derive an upper bound of the secret key rate and prove that the upper bound maximization is a convex optimization. After solving the upper bound maximization, the base station (BS) obtains the sum beams for all the users. To allocate the selected beams to each user, an efficient beam scheduling algorithm is proposed, which converges to a locally optimal solution with low computational complexity. Numerical results illustrate that in the proposed scheme, the bit disagreement ratio (BDR) of legitimate users achieves 10
⁻²
, while that of the eavesdropper tends to 0.5, confirming the feasibility and security of the proposed scheme.