Robust and Secure Wireless Communications via Intelligent Reflecting Surfaces

By Xianghao Yu, Dongfang Xu, Ying Sun, Derrick Wing Kwan Ng, Robert Schober. IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications, 2019

603 citations recorded by the source corpus.

In this paper, intelligent reflecting surfaces (IRSs) are employed to enhance the physical layer security in a challenging radio environment. In particular, a multi-antenna access point (AP) has to serve multiple single-antenna legitimate users, which do not have line-of-sight communication links, in the presence of multiple multi-antenna potential eavesdroppers whose channel state information (CSI) is not perfectly known. Artificial noise (AN) is transmitted from the AP to deliberately impair the eavesdropping channels for security provisioning. We investigate the joint design of the beamformers and AN covariance matrix at the AP and the phase shifters at the IRSs for maximization of the system sum-rate while limiting the maximum information leakage to the potential eavesdroppers. To this end, we formulate a robust non-convex optimization problem taking into account the impact of the imperfect CSI of the eavesdropping channels. To address the non-convexity of the optimization problem, an efficient algorithm is developed by capitalizing on alternating optimization, a penalty-based approach, successive convex approximation, and semidefinite relaxation. Simulation results show that IRSs can significantly improve the system secrecy performance compared to conventional architectures without IRS. Furthermore, our results unveil that, for physical layer security, uniformly distributing the reflecting elements among multiple IRSs is preferable over deploying them at a single IRS.

Subfields: Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Genetics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/93e69328375b8df4610610dc7418d647e87e9e41

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Citations in the corpus

Deep Reinforcement Learning-Based Intelligent Reflecting Surface for Secure Wireless Communications (2020, methodology): “[21] investigated an optimization problem with”
Prospective Multiple Antenna Technologies for Beyond 5G (2019, methodology): “In this section, we explore one potential way to achieve that by using passive MIMO antennas in an architecture4 known as an intelligent reflecting surface (IRS) [148]–[150] or software-”
A Framework of Robust Transmission Design for IRS-Aided MISO Communications With Imperfect Cascaded Channels (2020, methodology): “Then, the authors in [18] further proposed a robust secure transmission strategy by also applying the worst-case optimization method when the channels from the IRS to the eavesdroppers were imperfect.”
Reconfigurable Intelligent Surfaces: Principles and Opportunities (2020, methodology): “[156] considered an RIS-enhanced multi-user MISOME system under imperfect CSI to maximize the sum-rate, subject to the maximum information leakage constraint.”
Simultaneously Transmitting And Reflecting (STAR) RIS Aided Wireless Communications (2021, background): “The significant benefits of deploying RISs in wireless networks have also been verified in the context of physical layer security [20], unmanned aerial vehicle systems [21], and robotic communications systems [22].”
Physics-Based Modeling and Scalable Optimization of Large Intelligent Reflecting Surfaces (2020, methodology): “[13], [16], [17], [22], [32] have a complexity order that is at least cubic in Q, i.”
Smart Radio Environments Empowered by Reconfigurable Intelligent Surfaces: How it Works, State of Research, and Road Ahead (2020, background): “In [200], the authors use artificial noise for ensuring secure communication in an RIS-assisted network.”
Intelligent Reflecting Surface-Aided Wireless Communications: A Tutorial (2020, methodology): “, [93], [94], [132], [132], [150]–[160]), even for the challenging scenario when the conventional PHY-layer security techniques are ineffective [10], [93].”
Joint Transmit Waveform and Passive Beamforming Design for RIS-Aided DFRC Systems (2021, background): “(SWIPT) [19], [20], unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)-aided communications [21], physical-layer security [22], and symbol-level precoding [23], [24].”
A Survey on Channel Estimation and Practical Passive Beamforming Design for Intelligent Reflecting Surface Aided Wireless Communications (2021, methodology): “Secure MISO broadcast User sum rate maximization constrained by the worst-case information leakage to eavesdroppers AO with SCA, SDR, and penalty method [122]”
Modeling and Architecture Design of Reconfigurable Intelligent Surfaces Using Scattering Parameter Network Analysis (2020, background): “such as secure wireless communication [15], backscatter communication [16], simultaneous wireless information and power transfer (SWIPT) [17], [18], spectrum sharing [19], cognitive radio [20], unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) communication [21], millimeter wave [22], [23], and mobile edge computing [2”
Smart Radio Environments Empowered by Reconfigurable Intelligent Surfaces: How It Works, State of Research, and The Road Ahead (2020, background): “In [201], the authors use artificial noise for ensuring secure communication in an RIS-assisted network.”
Evolution of NOMA Toward Next Generation Multiple Access (NGMA) for 6G (2021, background): “Given the above favorable properties of RISs, extensive research efforts have been devoted to investigating the benefits of RIS-aided communication systems, such as the mitigation of interference [102], the reduction of transmit power [103], and the enhancement of communication secrecy [104].”