Optical beam cooperation‐based secrecy capacity enhancement for visible light communications

Abstract

Abstract To a large extent, the physical layer security (PLS) performance of a visible light communication (VLC) system is affected by light source radiation characteristics. Previous works are limited to well‐known Lambertian beam configurations, which fail to support flexible coordinated coverage. Unlike existing works, this article proposes one secrecy capacity (SC) enhancement scheme based on asymmetric non‐Lambertian optical beam cooperation. Without loss of generality, this article presents a numerical analysis of coordinated and non‐coordinated PLS performance in a typical indoor application scenario. Compared with a non‐coordinated benchmark, the numerical results illustrate that the proposed cooperation‐based scheme could induce about 0.88 bps/Hz average SC gain without a transmission power increase. Therefore, non‐Lambertian beam cooperation could be viewed as one promising secure VLC performance enhancement technology.

Keywords

• Free-space optical links