Do Not Forget the Past: A Buffer-Aided Framework for Relay Based Key Generation

We address relay-assisted key generation wherein two wireless nodes, that have no direct channel between them, seek the assistance of an intermediate relay to generate secret keys. In a celebrated version of the relay-assisted protocol, as applied by Lai et al., Zhou et al., Wang et al. and Waqas et al., the relay node generates pair-wise keys with the two nodes, and then broadcasts an XOR version of the two keys. Although such protocols are simple and effective, we observe that they face reduction in key rates due to two problems. First, for confidentiality, the relay broadcasts an XOR function of the pair-wise keys thereby pruning the length of the shared key to be the minimum of the key lengths of the pair-wise keys. Secondly, the broadcast phase may also experience outages thereby not being able to share the generated key in every round of the protocol. Identifying these issues, we propose a buffer-aided relaying protocol wherein buffer is used at the relay to store unused secret bits generated in the previous rounds of the protocol so as to provide confidentiality in the subsequent rounds of broadcast. On this buffer-aided protocol, we propose a power-allocation strategy between the phases of key generation and broadcast so as to maximize the throughput and key rate. Rigorous analyses show that buffer-aided relay when implemented along with the proposed power-allocation strategy offer remarkable advantages over existing baselines.