Enabling Secure Wireless Communications via Intelligent Reflecting Surfaces

By Xianghao Yu, Dongfang Xu, Robert Schober. Global Communications Conference, 2019

310 citations recorded by the source corpus.

In this paper, we propose to utilize intelligent reflecting surfaces (IRSs) for enhancing the physical layer security of wireless communications systems. In particular, an IRS-assisted secure wireless system is considered, where a multi-antenna transmitter communicates with a single-antenna receiver in the presence of an eavesdropper. To maximize the secrecy rate, both the beamformer at the transmitter and the IRS phase shifts are jointly optimized. Based on the block coordinate descent (BCD) and minorization maximization (MM) techniques, two efficient algorithms are developed to solve the resulting non-convex optimization problem for small- and large-scale IRSs, respectively. Simulation results show that IRSs can significantly improve physical layer security if the proposed algorithms are employed. Furthermore, we reveal that deploying large-scale IRSs is more efficient than enlarging the antenna array size of the transmitter for both boosting the secrecy rate and enhancing the energy efficiency.

Subfields: Aerospace Engineering, Electrical and Electronic Engineering

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/2f08144061f4c5461fe721cf7d1320b10c5eaf90

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Citations in the corpus

Multicell MIMO Communications Relying on Intelligent Reflecting Surfaces (2019, background): “Given the complex mathematical data rate expression, the techniques conceived in [15]–[23], [27]–[30] cannot be directly applied.”
Channel Estimation and Passive Beamforming for Intelligent Reflecting Surface: Discrete Phase Shift and Progressive Refinement (2019, background): “[21]–[24], simultaneous wireless information and power transfer (SWIPT) [25], [26], etc.”
Intelligent Reflecting Surface Aided Multigroup Multicast MISO Communication Systems (2019, methodology): “proposed low complexity algorithms based on MM (Majorization–Minimization or Minorization– Maximization) algorithm in [8] and manifold optimization in [12] to design reflection coefficients with the targets of maximizing the security capacity and spectral efficiency communications, respectively.”
Deep Reinforcement Learning-Based Intelligent Reflecting Surface for Secure Wireless Communications (2020, methodology): “utilized to optimize the joint transmit beamforming at the BS and phase shift coefficient at the IRS [16], [23].”
Toward Smart Wireless Communications via Intelligent Reflecting Surfaces: A Contemporary Survey (2019, methodology): “Considering a similar IRS-assisted secure wireless system to that in [160], the authors in [167] focus on a more challenging scenario in which the eavesdropping channel is better than the legitimate channel and they are also highly correlated in space.”
Channel Estimation for Intelligent Reflecting Surface Assisted Multiuser Communications: Framework, Algorithms, and Analysis (2019, background): “, [6]–[16]), where the effectiveness of IRS in enhancing the system throughput was verified.”
Wireless Communications Through Reconfigurable Intelligent Surfaces (2019, background): “Specifically, the authors of [83] considered an RIS-assisted secure communication system that consists of a legitimate receiver and an eavesdropper.”
An Overview of Signal Processing Techniques for RIS/IRS-Aided Wireless Systems (2021, unknown): “…t + β P T θ t S M ( η t ) , where β is a constant step size; (d) Retraction operator : This step aims to map ¯ φ t onto the manifold S M using the retraction operator θ t +1 = ¯ θ t (5) Element-wise block coordinate descent (BCD) [106]– [109] : The idea of the element-wise BCD algorithm is simple.”
Reconfigurable Intelligent Surfaces: Principles and Opportunities (2020, background): “[150] considered an RISenhanced multiple-input single-output single eavesdropper (MISOSE) channel, where the eavesdropper is equipped with a single antenna.”
Smart Radio Environments Empowered by Reconfigurable Intelligent Surfaces: How it Works, State of Research, and Road Ahead (2020, background): “In [198], the authors study an RIS-assisted wiretap channel, in which a multi-antenna transmitter communicates with a single-antenna receiver in the presence of an eavesdropper.”
Smart Radio Environments Empowered by Reconfigurable Intelligent Surfaces: How It Works, State of Research, and The Road Ahead (2020, background): “In [199], the authors study an RIS-assisted wiretap channel,”