A crypto-coding method based on punctured turbo codes for wireless communication systems

Abstract

Encryption and error correction play important roles in secure and reliable wireless communication systems. However, these two functions are performed independently in two different layers which consume a lot of resources. In this work, a crypto-coding method is proposed for these two functions in a single step to reduce the computational complexity and hardware structure. The proposed crypto-coding method is implemented by using a secret key to control the punctured block of the Turbo codes. The secret key is generated from the wireless channel characteristics of single-input single-output (SISO) systems, which ensures the randomness according to the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) version 800-22REV1A. The simulations are executed through the Additive White Gaussian Noise (AWGN) and Rayleigh channels. The simulated results show that the generated keys satisfy the randomness according to the NIST standard, which is evaluated by p -values below 0.01. In addition, the proposed crypto-coding method effectively improves the error correction ability and provides the same computational complexity as the conventional Turbo codes. Meanwhile, this method does not require any extra hardware to manage and distribute secret keys.