Entropy, Vol. 23, Pages 1342: Intelligent Reflecting Surface Assisted Multi-User Robust Secret Key Generation for Low-Entropy Environments (Entropy)

Channel secret key generation (CSKG), assisted by the new material intelligent reflecting surface (IRS), has become a new research hotspot recently. In this paper, the key extraction method in the IRS-aided low-entropy communication scenario with adjacent multi-users is investigated. Aiming at the problem of low key generation efficiency due to the high similarity of channels between users, we propose a joint user allocation and IRS reflection parameter adjustment scheme, while the reliability of information exchange during the key generation process is also considered. Specifically, the relevant key capability expressions of the IRS-aided communication system is analyzed. Then, we study how to adjust the IRS reflection matrix and allocate the corresponding users to minimize the similarity of different channels and ensure the robustness of key generation. The simulation results show that the proposed scheme can bring higher gains to the performance of key generation.