Enhancement of physical layer security with simultaneous beamforming and jamming for visible light communication systems

This paper considers physical layer security enhancement mechanisms that utilize simultaneous beamforming and jamming in visible light communication (VLC) systems with a randomly located eavesdropper under the assumption that there are multiple light-emitting diode (LED) transmitters and one intended user. When an eavesdropper with an augmented frontend receiver is present, the jamming is very useful for preventing the eavesdropper from wiretapping the information since it is not possible to extract only the information component from the received signal if the jamming signal is random. Thus, in this paper, an optimization problem is formulated with a focus on the signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio for the legitimate link, and it is solved by a heuristic method called the concave-convex procedure. Then, a ternary scheme is proposed, which is less complicated than the full (joint) scheme, and it is optimized by adopting a formulation based on an assignment problem, the solution of which is effectively obtained by the so-called tabu search procedure. Additionally, the problem of maximizing the average secrecy rate is investigated by utilizing a continuous LED model, which significantly relaxes the complication that rises from calculating the expectation with respect to the location of the eavesdropper. Our analysis and simulation results show that the proposed simultaneous beamforming and jamming strategies (both joint and ternary) are good proxies for maximizing the average secrecy rate by utilizing the statistical information on the eavesdropper’s random location