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Impact of Multiple Reflections on Secrecy Capacity of Indoor VLC System

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Information and Communications Security (ICICS 2019)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNSC,volume 11999))

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Abstract

While visible light communication (VLC) is expected to have a wide range of applications in the near future, the security vulnerabilities of this technology have not been well understood so far. In particular, due to the extremely short wavelength of visible light, the VLC channel presents several unique characteristics than its radio frequency counterparts, which impose new features on the VLC security. Taking a physical-layer security perspective, this paper studies the intrinsic secrecy capacity of VLC as induced by its special channel characteristics. Different from existing models that only consider the specular reflection in the VLC channel, a modified Monte Carlo ray tracing model is proposed to account for both the specular and the diffusive reflections, which is unique to VLC. Based on this model the upper and the lower bounds of the VLC secrecy capacity are derived, which allow us to evaluate the VLC communication confidentiality against a comprehensive set of factors, including the locations of the transmitter, receiver, and eavesdropper, the VLC channel bandwidth, the ratio between the specular and diffusive reflections, and the reflection coefficient. Our results reveal that due to the different types of reflections, the VLC system becomes more vulnerable at specific locations where strong reflections exist.

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Acknowledgments

This work is supported in part by U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) under grants CNS-1837034, CNS-1745254, CNS-1659965, and CNS-1460897. Any opinions, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this paper are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of NSF.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Auburn University, Auburn, AL, 36849, USA

    Jian Chen & Tao Shu

Authors
  1. Jian Chen
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  2. Tao Shu
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Correspondence to Tao Shu .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Singapore University of Technology and Design, Singapore, Singapore

    Jianying Zhou

  2. The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Kowloon, Hong Kong

    Xiapu Luo

  3. Peking University, Beijing, China

    Qingni Shen

  4. Institute of Information Engineering, Beijing, China

    Zhen Xu

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Chen, J., Shu, T. (2020). Impact of Multiple Reflections on Secrecy Capacity of Indoor VLC System. In: Zhou, J., Luo, X., Shen, Q., Xu, Z. (eds) Information and Communications Security. ICICS 2019. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 11999. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-41579-2_7

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-41579-2_7

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-030-41578-5

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-030-41579-2

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