Multiple Optical Beam Switching for Physical Layer Security of Visible Light Communications

Abstract

Visible light communications (VLC) techniques are viewed as promising candidates for the upcoming B5G&6G mobile wireless networks. Due to the broadcast nature of VLC channel, physical layer security (PLS) techniques have been considered and explored to improve the confidentiality of VLC transmission. Nevertheless, almost all current designs focus on application scenarios including sufficient transmitters and fail to match the scenarios with limited, even just two transmitters. For addressing this challenge, in this article, multiple optical beam switching scheme is proposed. Unlike conventional Lambertian beam based technique paradigm, the given scheme tentatively utilize two asymmetry non-Lambertian beams to configure each VLC transmitter. Numerical results show that, for the typical center legitimate receiver, compared with about 0.92 bps/Hz average secrecy capacity (SC) of the conventional Lambertian beam configuration, up to 5.55 bps/Hz average SC gain is acquired through the proposed beam switching scheme. Moreover, this potential gain will be enhanced to about 5.86 bps/Hz when three candidate non-Lambertian beams are available for each transmitter.

Keywords

• Multiple optical beam switching
• physical layer security
• secrecy capacity
• visible light communications