Reliability and security performances analysis of rate splitting based VLC system with HARQ

This work first attempts to investigate the reliability and physical layer security (PLS) performances of a rate splitting (RS) based visible light communication (VLC) system with one trusted user and one untrusted user. Specifically, the hybrid automatic repeat request (HARQ) protocol is adopted at the trusted user and the movement of users is assumed to be subject to the random way point (RWP) model with four decoding strategies considered at receiver side. The exact closed-form expressions of outage probability (OP) for both users are then obtained, and the analytical expressions of secrecy outage probability (SOP), reliable and secure transmission probability (RSP), and effective secrecy throughput (EST) of trusted user are also mathematically derived. Through simulations, it is found that to guarantee the reliability and PLS performances, the trusted user should first decode the untrusted user's private stream and the untrusted user should first decode the trusted user's private stream. Besides, the reliability and PLS performances of RS-VLC system could be enhanced with the appropriate increase in the maximum transmission round of HARQ with the best decoding strategy. Moreover, they could be further enhanced by the proper common stream power allocation coefficient. This work will benefit the research and development of indoor VLC system. •This study first proposes the RS-VLC system with HARQ and investigates the system's reliability and PLS performances.•This work derives the expressions of the OP, SOP, RSP and EST of the trusted user under four decoding strategies.•The impacts of some key parameters on the reliability and PLS performances of this system have been investigated.