Physical-Layer Security for Indoor VLC Wiretap Systems Under Multipath Reflections

Abstract

In this paper, we consider the physical-layer security for single-input single-output (SISO) indoor visible light communication (VLC) wiretap systems in the presence of multipath reflections. We derive both the lower and upper bounds on the secrecy capacity in the context of both the symbol- and block-based transmission policies. To enhance the secrecy performance relying on block transmission policy, we propose a low-complexity amplitude scaling (AS) scheme by scaling the amplitudes of different symbols in each block to maximize the achievable secrecy rate. We further provide the upper bound on the optimal secrecy rate achieved by precoding for the sake of validating the effectiveness of the proposed AS scheme. Numerical results suggest that the secrecy performance is severely degraded by inter-symbol interference (ISI) imposed by multipath reflections, which yet can be alleviated by long-block based transmission. Moreover, the proposed AS scheme can enhance the secrecy performance significantly and achieve a secrecy rate very close to the optimal solution.