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

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.