RIS-Assisted Physical Layer Security in Emerging RF and Optical Wireless Communication Systems: A Comprehensive Survey

Physical layer security (PLS) has received a growing interest from the research community for its ability to safeguard data confidentiality without relying on key distribution or encryption/decryption. However, the evolution towards the 5G technology and beyond poses new security challenges that must be addressed in order to fulfill the unprecedented performance requirements of future wireless networks. Among the potential enabling technologies, RIS has attracted extensive attention due to its ability to proactively and intelligently reconfigure the wireless propagation environment to combat dynamic wireless channel impairments. Consequently, the RIS technology can be adopted to improve the information-theoretic security of both RF and OWC systems. This survey paper provides a comprehensive overview of the information-theoretic security of RIS-based RF and optical systems. The article first discusses the fundamental concepts of PLS and RIS technologies, followed by their combination in both RF and OWC systems. Subsequently, some optimization techniques are presented in the context of the underlying system model, followed by an assessment of the impact of RIS-assisted PLS through a comprehensive performance analysis. Given that the computational complexity of future communication systems that adopt RIS-assisted PLS is likely to increase rapidly as the number of interactions between the users and infrastructure grows, ML is seen as a promising approach to address this complexity issue while sustaining or improving the network performance. A discussion of recent research studies on RIS-assisted PLS-based systems embedded with ML is presented. Furthermore, some important open research challenges are proposed and discussed to provide insightful future research directions, with the aim of moving a step closer towards the development and implementation of the forthcoming 6G wireless technology.

Optical STAR-RIS-Aided VLC Systems: RSMA Versus NOMA

A critical concern within the realm of visible light communications (VLC) pertains to enhancing system data rate, particularly in scenarios where the direct line-of-sight (LoS) connection is obstructed by obstacles. The deployment of meta-surface-based simultaneous transmission and reflection reconfigurable intelligent surface (STAR-RIS) has emerged to combat challenging LoS blockage scenarios and to provide 360 coverage in radio-frequency wireless systems. Recently, the concept of optical simultaneous transmission and reflection reconfigurable intelligent surface (OSTAR-RIS) has been promoted for VLC systems. This work is dedicated to studying the performance of OSTAR-RIS in detail and unveiling the VLC system performance gain under such technology. Specifically, we propose a novel multi-user indoor VLC system that is assisted by OSTAR-RIS. To improve the sum rate performance of the proposed system, both power-domain non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) and rate splitting multiple access (RSMA) are investigated in this work. To realize this, a sum rate maximization problem that jointly optimizes the roll and yaw angles of the reflector elements as well as the refractive index of the refractor elements in OSTAR-RIS is formulated, solved, and evaluated. The maximization problem takes into account practical considerations, such as the presence of non-users (i.e., blockers) and the orientation of the recipient's device. The sine-cosine meta-heuristic algorithm is employed to get the optimal solution of the formulated non-convex optimization problem. Moreover, the study delves into the sum energy efficiency optimization of the proposed system. Simulation results indicate that the proposed OSTAR-RIS RSMA-aided VLC system outperforms the OSTAR-RIS NOMA-based VLC system in terms of both the sum rate and the sum energy efficiency.

Liquid Crystal-Based RIS for VLC Transmitters: Performance Analysis, Challenges, and Opportunities

This article presents a novel approach of using reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RISs) in the transmitter of indoor visible light communication (VLC) systems to enhance data rate uniformity and maintain adequate illumination. In this approach, a liquid crystal (LC)-based RIS is placed in front of the LED arrays of the transmitter to form an LC-based RIS-enabled VLC transmitter. This RIS-enabled transmitter is able to perform new functions such as transmit light steering and amplification and demonstrates very high data rate and illumination performance when compared with traditional VLC transmitters with circular and distributed LED arrays and the more recent angle diversity transmitter. Simulation results reveal the strong potential of LC-based RIS-aided transmitters in satisfying the joint illumination and communication needs of indoor VLC systems and positions VLC as a critical essential block for next generation communication networks. Several challenging and exciting issues related to the realization of such transmitters are discussed.

Energy-Efficient Resource Allocation for Aggregated RF/VLC Systems

Visible light communication (VLC) is envisioned as a core component of future wireless communication networks due to, among others, the huge unlicensed bandwidth it offers and the fact that it does not cause any interference to existing radio frequency (RF) communication systems. Most research on RF and VLC coexistence has focused on hybrid designs where data transmission to any user could originate from either an RF or a VLC access point (AP). However, hybrid RF/VLC systems fail to exploit the distinct transmission characteristics of RF and VLC systems to fully reap the benefits they can offer. Aggregated RF/VLC systems, in which any user can be served simultaneously by both RF and VLC APs, have recently emerged as a more promising and robust design for the coexistence of RF and VLC systems. To this end, this paper, for the first time, investigates AP assignment, subchannel allocation (SA), and transmit power allocation (PA) to optimize the energy efficiency (EE) of aggregated RF/VLC systems while considering the effects of interference and VLC line-of-sight link blockages. A novel and challenging EE optimization problem is formulated for which an efficient joint solution based on alternating optimization is developed. More particularly, an energy-efficient AP assignment algorithm based on matching theory is proposed. Then, a low-complexity SA scheme that allocates subchannels to users based on their channel conditions is developed. Finally, an effective PA algorithm is presented by utilizing the quadratic transform approach and a multi-objective optimization framework. Extensive simulation results reveal that: 1) the proposed joint AP assignment, SA, and PA solution obtains significant EE, sum-rate, and outage performance gains with low complexity, and 2) the aggregated RF/VLC system provides considerable performance improvement compared to hybrid RF/VLC systems.

RIS-Assisted Visible Light Communication Systems: A Tutorial

Recent development of the fifth-generation (5G) of cellular networks has led to their deployment worldwide. As part of the implementation, one of the challenges that must be addressed is the skip-zone problem, which occurs when objects obstruct the transmission of signals. A signal obstruction can significantly reduce the signal-to-noise ratio in radio frequency (RF) and indoor visible light communications (VLC) systems, whereas the obstruction can completely disrupt data transmission in free-space optical (FSO) systems. Therefore, the skip-zone dilemma must be resolved to ensure the efficient operation of 5G and beyond networks. In recent years, reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RISs) that are more efficient than relays have become widely accepted as a method of mitigating skip-zones and providing reconfigurable radio environments. However, there have been limited studies on RISs for optical wireless communication (OWC) systems. This paper aims to provide a comprehensive tutorial on indoor VLC systems utilizing RISs technology. The article discusses the basics of VLC and RISs and reintroduces RISs for OWC systems, focusing on RIS-assisted indoor VLC systems. We also provide a comprehensive overview of optical RISs and examine the differences between optical RISs, RF-RISs, and optical relays. Furthermore, we discuss in detail how RISs can be used to overcome line-of-sight blockages and device orientation issue in VLC systems while revealing key challenges such as RIS element orientation design, RIS elements to access point/user assignment design, and RIS array positioning design problems that need to be studied. Moreover, we discuss and propose several research problems on integrating optical RISs with other emerging technologies and highlight other important research directions for RIS-assisted VLC systems.