Improving the Confidentiality of VLC Channels: Physical-Layer Security Approaches

Visible light communication (VLC) is considered as an emerging system for wireless indoor multimedia communications. As any wireless communication system, its channels are open and reachable to both licensed and unlicensed users owing to the broadcast character of visible-light propagation in public areas or multiple-user scenarios. In this work, we consider the physical-layer security approaches for VLC to mitigate this limitation. The physical-layer security approaches can be divided into two categories: keyless security and key-based security approaches. In the last category, recently, the authors introduced physical-layer key-generation approaches for optical orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) systems. In these approaches, the cyclic prefix (CP) samples are exploited for key generation. In this paper, we study the effect of the length of key space and order of modulation on the security level, BER performance, and key-disagreement-rate (KDR) of the introduced key-based security approaches. From the results, our approaches are more efficient in higher order of modulation as the KDR decreases with the increase of order of modulation.