Visible Light Communication Cyber Security Vulnerabilities For Indoor And Outdoor Vehicle-To-Vehicle Communication

Light fidelity (Li-Fi), developed from the approach of Visible Light Communication (VLC), is a great replacement or complement to existing radio frequency-based (RF) networks. Li-Fi is expected to be deployed in various environments were, due to Wi-Fi congestion and health limitations, RF should not be used. Moreover, VLC can provide the future fifth generation (5G) wireless technology with higher data rates for device connectivity which will alleviate the traffic demand. 5G is playing a vital role in encouraging the modern applications. In 2023, the deployment of all the cellular networks will reach more than 5 billion users globally. As a result, the security and privacy of 5G wireless networks is an essential problem as those modern applications are in people\u27s life everywhere. VLC security is as one of the core physical-layer security (PLS) solutions for 5G networks. Due to the fact that light does not penetrate through solid objects or walls, VLC naturally has higher security and privacy for indoor wireless networks compared to RF networks. However, the broadcasting nature of VLC caused concerns, e.g., eavesdropping, have created serious attention as it is a crucial step to validate the success of VLC in wild. The aim of this thesis is to properly address the security issues of VLC and further enhance the VLC nature security. We analyzed the secrecy performance of a VLC model by studying the characteristics of the transmitter, receiver and the visible light channel. Moreover, we mitigated the security threats in the VLC model for the legitimate user, by 1) implementing more access points (APs) in a multiuser VLC network that are cooperated, 2) reducing the semi-angle of LED to help improve the directivity and secrecy and, 3) using the protected zone strategy around the AP where eavesdroppers are restricted. According to the model\u27s parameters, the results showed that the secrecy performance in the proposed indoor VLC model and the vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) VLC outdoor model using a combination of multiple PLS techniques as beamforming, secure communication zones, and friendly jamming is enhanced. The proposed model security performance was measured with respect to the signal to noise ratio (SNR), received optical power, and bit error rate (BER) Matlab simulation results

3-D Hybrid VLC-RF Indoor IoT Systems with Light Energy Harvesting

In this paper, a 3-dimensional (3-D) hybrid visible light communication (VLC)-radio frequency (RF) indoor internet of things system with spatially random terminals with one photodiode (e.g., indoor sensors: temperature sensors, humidity sensors, and indoor air quality sensors) is considered. Specifically, homogeneous Poisson point process is adopted to model to the distribution of the terminals, which means that the number of the terminals obeys Poisson distribution, and the positions of the terminals are uniformly distributed. VLC and RF communications are employed over downlink and uplink, respectively. Meanwhile, the terminals are designed to harvest the energy from the light emitted by the light-emitting diode over the downlink, which is used for the transmissions over the uplink. The light energy harvesting model is considered after introducing the line of sight propagation model for VLC. Then, the outage performance has been studied for the VLC downlink and non-orthogonal multiple access schemes over the RF uplink, respectively, by using stochastic geometry theory, while considering the randomness of the number of the terminals, and all terminals are spatially and randomly distributed in the 3-D room and all RF uplinks follow Rician fading. Finally, the approximated analytical expressions for the outage probability are derived and verified through Monte Carlo simulations

Visible Light Communication (VLC)

Visible light communication (VLC) using light-emitting diodes (LEDs) or laser diodes (LDs) has been envisioned as one of the key enabling technologies for 6G and Internet of Things (IoT) systems, owing to its appealing advantages, including abundant and unregulated spectrum resources, no electromagnetic interference (EMI) radiation and high security. However, despite its many advantages, VLC faces several technical challenges, such as the limited bandwidth and severe nonlinearity of opto-electronic devices, link blockage and user mobility. Therefore, significant efforts are needed from the global VLC community to develop VLC technology further. This Special Issue, “Visible Light Communication (VLC)”, provides an opportunity for global researchers to share their new ideas and cutting-edge techniques to address the above-mentioned challenges. The 16 papers published in this Special Issue represent the fascinating progress of VLC in various contexts, including general indoor and underwater scenarios, and the emerging application of machine learning/artificial intelligence (ML/AI) techniques in VLC

Design of VLC and heterogeneous RF/VLC systems for future generation networks: an algorithmic approach

Visible light communication (VLC) has attracted significant research interest within the last decade due in part to the vast amount of unused transmission bandwidth in the visible light spectrum. VLC is expected to be part of future generation networks. The heterogeneous integration of radio frequency (RF) and VLC systems has been envisioned as a promising solution to increase the capacity of wireless networks, especially in indoor environments. However, the promised advantages of VLC and heterogeneous RF/VLC systems cannot be realized without proper resource management algorithms that exploit the distinguishing characteristics between RF and VLC systems. Further, the problem of backhauling for VLC systems has received little attention. This dissertation’s first part focuses on designing and optimizing VLC and heterogeneous RF/VLC systems. Novel resource allocation algorithms that optimize the sum-rate and energy efficiency performances of VLC, hybrid, and aggregated RF/VLC systems while considering practical constraints like illumination requirements, inter-cell interference, quality-of-service requirements, and transmit power budgets are proposed. Moreover, a power line communicationbased backhaul solution for an indoor VLC system is developed, and a backhaul-aware resource allocation algorithm is proposed. These algorithms are developed by leveraging tools from fractional programming (i.e., Dinkelbach’s transform and quadratic transform), the multiplier adjustment method, matching theory, and multi-objective optimization. The latter part of this dissertation examines the adoption of emerging beyond 5G technologies, such as intelligent reflecting surfaces (IRSs) and reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RISs), to overcome the limitations of VLC systems and boost their performance gains. Novel system models for IRSs-aided and RISs-aided VLC systems are proposed, and metaheuristic-based algorithms are developed to optimize the configurations of the IRSs/RISs and, consequently, the performance of VLC systems. Extensive simulations reveal that the proposed resource allocation schemes outperform the considered benchmarks and provide performance close to the optimal solution. Furthermore, the proposed system models achieve superior performance compared to benchmark system models

LiFi Transceiver Designs for 6G Wireless Networks

Due to the dramatic increase in high data rate services, and in order to meet the demands of the sixth-generation (6G) wireless networks, researchers from both academia and industry have been exploring advanced transmission techniques, new network archi- tectures and new frequency bands, such as the millimeter wave (mmWave), the infrared, and the visible light bands. Light-fdelity (LiFi) particularly is an emerging, novel, bidirectional, high-speed and fully networked optical wireless communication (OWC) technology that has been introduced as a promising solution for 6G networks, especially for indoor connectivity, owing to the large unexploited spectrum that translates to signifcantly high data rates. Although there has been a big leap in the maturity of the LiFi technology, there is still a considerable gap between the available LiFi technology and the required demands of 6G networks. Motivated by this, this dissertation aims to bridge between the current research literature of LiFi and the expected demands of 6G networks. Specifcally, the key goal of this dissertation is to fll some shortcomings in the LiFi technology, such as channel modeling, transceiver designs, channel state information (CSI) acquisition, localization, quality-of-service (QoS), and performance optimization. Our work is devoted to address and solve some of these limitations. Towards achieving this goal, this dissertation makes signifcant contributions to several areas of LiFi. First, it develops novel and measurements-based channel models for LiFi systems that are required for performance analysis and handover management. Second, it proposes a novel design for LiFi devices that is capable of alleviating the real behaviour of users and the impurities of indoor propagation environments. Third, it proposes intelligent, accurate and fast joint position and orientation techniques for LiFi devices, which improve the CSI estimation process and boost the indoor location-based and navigation-based services. Then, it proposes novel proactive optimization technique that can provide near-optimal and real-time service for indoor mobile LiFi users that are running some services with high data rates, such as extended reality, video conferencing, and real-time video monitoring. Finally, it proposes advanced multiple access techniques that are capable of cancelling the efects of interference in indoor multi-user settings. The studied problems are tackled using various tools from probability and statistic theory, system design and integration theory, optimization theory, and deep learning. The Results demonstrate the efectiveness of the proposed designs, solutions, and techniques. Nevertheless, the fndings in this dissertation highlight key guidelines for the efective design of LiFi while considering their unique propagation features