Cyber security vulnerabilities for outdoor vehicular visible light communication in secure platoon network: Review, power distribution, and signal to noise ratio analysis

Abstract

Light Fidelity (LiFi), a 5th Generation visible light communication (VLC) technology, is anticipated to be utilized in various locations where radio frequency (RF) cannot be deployed, due to RF health limitations and congestion. VLC offers a robust communication link for Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks (VANETs), where cars interact wirelessly to enhance the traffic flow and road safety. Thus VLC has been considered as a complementary approach to RF in Vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communication, for its potential to mitigate security vulnerabilities caused in RF V2V communication by using light directivity and impermeability. V2V VLC privacy and security are fields that have been hardly examined. In this study, we work on multiple VLC challenges and motivation especially for the security performance of the physical layer of a V2V VLC-based protocol. We introduce an improved V2V VLC proposed model and define a security protocol to enhance received power distribution and secrecy performance. We followed a two-step process to achieve this aim, first decrease the LED semi-angle then apply the protected zone between the legitimate vehicles where adversaries are banned. The simulation results, measuring the received optical power, SNR and BER, show that V2V VLC received power and secrecy performance are improved by using the proposed model.