Securing visible light communications with spatial jamming

In this paper, we propose a secure visible light communication (VLC) system with a novel spatial jamming scheme, which is inspired by practical observations of indoor VLC environments. In reality, probable and approximate locations of VLC users can be anticipated by analyzing the user behavior characteristic and the layout of the room. Based on the available location knowledge of a legitimate user (UE) and an eavesdropper (ED), an LED transmitter can choose to convey data or a jamming signal. We call this strategy spatial jamming. By employing a continuous LED model, the related optimization problems are formulated and analyzed based on the signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio and the secrecy rate, respectively. The numerical results are provided to validate the prediction that the proposed spatial jamming scheme can effectively secure a VLC transmission even when the LEDs do not know the exact location of the ED