Building Resilience in Wireless Communication Systems With a Secret-Key Budget

Abstract: Resilience and power consumption are two important performance metrics for many modern communication systems, and it is therefore important to define, analyze, and optimize them. In this work, we consider a wireless communication system with secret-key generation, in which the secret-key bits are added to and used from a pool of available key bits. We propose novel physical layer resilience metrics for the survivability of such systems. In addition, we propose multiple power allocation schemes and analyze their trade-off between resilience and power consumption. In particular, we investigate and compare constant power allocation, an adaptive analytical algorithm, and a reinforcement learning-based solution. It is shown how the transmit power can be minimized such that a specified resilience is guaranteed. These results can be used directly by designers of such systems to optimize the system parameters for the desired performance in terms of reliability, security, and resilience.