Performance of secret key generation in non stationary channels

Secret key generation from the randomness provided by random channels is currently considered as one way to improve security in wireless communications at the physical layer level. However, the relation between the performance of SKG schemes and the characteristics of the radio channel has been moderately investigated. In this work, we evaluate the security performance through a simple channel model based on scatterers distributed around the terminals, which enables going beyond the common assumption of spatial stationarity between the legitimate terminal and the eavesdropper. This performance is assessed both from information theory metrics and from a practical key extraction algorithm.