Physical Layer Security With DCO-OFDM-Based VLC Under the Effects of Clipping Noise and Imperfect CSI

Visible light communications (VLC) and physical-layer security (PLS) are key candidate technologies for 6G wireless communication. This paper combines these two technologies by considering an orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) technique called DC-biased optical OFDM (DCO-OFDM) equipped with PLS as applied to indoor VLC systems. First, a novel PLS algorithm is designed to protect the DCO-OFDM transmission of the legitimate user from an eavesdropper. A closed-form expression for the achievable secrecy rate is derived and compared with the conventional DCO-OFDM without security. To analyze the security performance of the PLS algorithm under the effects of the residual clipping noise and the channel estimation errors, a closed-form expression is derived for a Bayesian estimator of the clipping noise induced naturally at the DCO-OFDM systems after estimating the optical channel impulse response (CIR), by a pilot-aided sparse channel estimation algorithm with the compressed sensing approach, in the form of the orthogonal matching pursuit (OMP), and the least-squares (LS). Finally, from the numerical and the computer simulations, it is shown that the proposed PLS algorithm with secret key exchange guarantees the eavesdropper’s BER to stay close to 0.5 and that the proposed encryption-based PLS algorithm does not affect the BER performance of the legitimate user in the system.