This work studies an energy-efficient jamming scheme for enhancing physical layer security in visible light communication (VLC). We consider a VLC system where multiple LED luminaries are deployed together with a legitimate user (i.e., Bob) and passive eavesdroppers (i.e., Eves). In such a scenario, the closest LED luminary to Bob serves as the transmitter while the rest of the luminaries act as jammers transmitting artificial noise (AN) to possibly degrade the quality of Eves' channels. A joint design of precoder and AN is then investigated to maximize the energy efficiency (EE) of the communication channel to Bob while ensuring a certain amount of AN power to confuse Eves. To solve the design problem, we make use of a combination of the Dinkelbach and convex-concave procedure (CCCP), which guarantees to converge to a local optimum.
This work studies an energy-efficient jamming scheme for enhancing physical layer security in visible light communication (VLC). We consider a VLC system where multiple LED luminaries are deployed together with a legitimate user (i.e., Bob) and passive eavesdroppers (i.e., Eves). In such a scenario, the closest LED luminary to Bob serves as the transmitter while the rest of the luminaries act as jammers transmitting artificial noise (AN) to possibly degrade the quality of Eves' channels. A joint design of precoder and AN is then investigated to maximize the energy efficiency (EE) of the communication channel to Bob while ensuring a certain amount of AN power to confuse Eves. To solve the design problem, we make use of a combination of the Dinkelbach and convex-concave procedure (CCCP), which guarantees to converge to a local optimum.
This paper studies the design of energy-efficient artificial noise (AN) schemes in the context of physical layer security in visible light communications (VLC). Two different transmission schemes termed selective AN-aided single-input single-output (SISO) and AN-aided multiple-input single-output (MISO) are examined and compared in terms of secrecy energy efficiency (SEE). In the former, the closest LED luminaire to the legitimate user (Bob) is the information-bearing signal’s transmitter. At the same time, the rest of the luminaries act as jammers transmitting AN to degrade the channels of eavesdroppers (Eves). In the latter, the information-bearing signal and AN are combined and transmitted by all luminaries. When Eves’ CSI is unknown, an indirect design to improve the SEE is formulated by maximizing Bob’s channel’s energy efficiency. A low-complexity design based on the zero-forcing criterion is also proposed. In the case of known Eves’ CSI, we study the design that maximizes the minimum SEE among those corresponding to all eavesdroppers. At their respective optimal SEEs, simulation results reveal that when Eves’ CSI is unknown, the selective AN-aided SISO transmission can archive twice as good SEE as the AN-aided MISO does. In contrast, when Eves’ CSI is known, the AN-aided MISO outperforms by 30%.
Despite offering higher security than radio frequency (RF) channels, the broadcast nature of the visible light communication (VLC) channel makes VLC links inherently susceptible to eavesdropping by unauthorized users. In this work, we consider the physical-layer security of VLC links aided by friendly jamming. The jammer has multiple light sources, but does not have access to the data transmitted. The eavesdropper's reception is degraded by a jamming signal that causes no interference to the legitimate receiver. Due to the limited dynamic range of typical light-emitting diodes (LEDs), both the data and jamming signals are subject to amplitude constraints. Therefore, we begin with deriving a closed-form secrecy rate expression for the corresponding wiretap channel, and adopt secrecy rate as the performance measure. Then, we formulate a linear programming problem to maximize the secrecy rate when the eavesdropper's channel is accurately known to the jammer. Finally, we consider robust beamforming to maximize the worst-case secrecy rate when information about the eavesdropper's channel is uncertain due to location uncertainty. The robust scheme makes use of simple linear programming, making real-time implementation feasible in a variety of real-world scenarios.
Securing visible light communication (VLC) systems with physical-layer technologies has drawn increasing attention. In this paper, we leverage both transmit beamforming and jamming techniques to enhance communication secrecy for a multiple-input single-output (MISO) VLC system with presence of multiple eavesdroppers. The transmit beamformer and jamming precoder are jointly optimized in the sense that the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) of the legitimate user is maximized subject to maximum SNR constraints imposed on eavesdroppers, as well as light-emitting diode (LED) optical power constraints. Despite the fact that the corresponding optimization problem has a nonconvex fractional form, we are able to determine its locally optimal solution via Charnes-Cooper transformation and minorization-maximization algorithm. Furthermore, we study the extension to a more complicated scenario where perfect channel state information at the transmitter (CSIT) is not available. The superiority of the proposed algorithms is finally verified via simulations.
Recent developments in visible light communications (VLC) have focused on enhancing its security and privacy. This paper studies the physical layer security in VLC networks with multiple users when there is a single wiretap eavesdropper. In particular, our aim is to design the optimal artificial noise (AN)-aided precoding scheme to improve the secrecy performance in terms of legitimate users and eavesdropper’s signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratios (SINRs). The purpose of our AN-aided precoding design is to ensure a fairness of the legitimate users’ SINRs while impairing the quality of eavesdropper’s channel as much as possible. Depending on the availability of the eavesdropper’s channel state information (CSI) at the transmitters, there are generally two design strategies. When the eavesdropper’s CSI is unknown to the transmitters (i.e., passive eavesdropper), the AN is constructed to be orthogonal to the users’ aggregate channel matrix. In case the eavesdropper’s CSI is available (i.e., active eavesdropper), the AN design strategy is to keep the SINR of the eavesdropper below a certain predefined threshold. Aside from the general design, we also study a specific design with the zero-forcing (ZF) technique and compare its performance with that of the general design. In both designs, numerical results show that significant gaps between users’ and eavesdropper’s SINR can always be achieved, thus guaranteeing a high secrecy performance. It is also observed that while the general design outperforms the ZF one in terms of the users’ SINRs, it does not result in lower eavesdropper’s SINRs compared to the ZF design, especially in the low transmit power region.
This paper considers physical layer security enhancement mechanisms that utilize simultaneous beamforming and jamming in visible light communication systems with a randomly located eavesdropper under the assumption that there are multiple light-emitting diode (LED) transmitters and one intended user. When an eavesdropper with an augmented front-end receiver is present, the jamming is very useful for preventing the eavesdropper from wiretapping the information since it is not possible to extract only the information component from the received signal if the jamming signal is random. Thus, in this paper, an optimization problem is formulated with a focus on the signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio for the legitimate link, and it is solved by a heuristic method called the concave-convex procedure. Then, a ternary scheme is proposed, which is less complicated than the full (joint) scheme, and it is optimized by adopting a formulation based on an assignment problem, the solution of which is effectively obtained by the so-called tabu search procedure. In addition, the problem of maximizing the average secrecy rate is investigated by utilizing a continuous LED model, which significantly relaxes the complication that rises from calculating the expectation with respect to the location of the eavesdropper. Our analysis and simulation results show that the proposed simultaneous beamforming and jamming strategies (both joint and ternary) are good proxies for maximizing the average secrecy rate by utilizing the statistical information on the eavesdropper's random location.
Secure transmission is becoming an essentially important aspect in visible light communication (VLC). In this paper, we investigate the designs of artificial noise (AN)-aided precoding to improve physical layer security in a multi-user single eavesdropper wiretap VLC channels. The AN-aided precoding is designed to solve the max-min fairness signal- to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR) problem among users in two different scenarios: unknown and known eavesdropper's channel state information (CSI) at the transmitter. In the former case, we adopt the traditional null- space AN scheme and then study the impact of the AN power on the fairness performance. In the case of known eavesdropper's CSI, the AN-aided precoding is designed in such a way that keeps the SINR of the eavesdropper below a predefined threshold. Numerical results show that in both cases, the design could significantly degrade the quality of the eavesdropper's channel, thus enhancing communication secrecy.