Securing Visible Light Communications via Friendly Jamming

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.