Secure Wireless Communication via Intelligent Reflecting Surface

By Miao Cui, Guangchi Zhang, Rui Zhang. IEEE Wireless Communications Letters, 2019

898 citations recorded by the source corpus.

An intelligent reflecting surface (IRS) can adaptively adjust the phase shifts of its reflecting units to strengthen the desired signal and/or suppress the undesired signal. In this letter, we investigate an IRS-aided secure wireless communication system where a multi-antenna access point (AP) sends confidential messages to a single-antenna user in the presence of a single-antenna eavesdropper. In particular, we consider the challenging scenario where the eavesdropping channel is stronger than the legitimate communication channel and they are also highly correlated in space. We maximize the secrecy rate of the legitimate communication link by jointly designing the AP’s transmit beamforming and the IRS’s reflect beamforming. While the resultant optimization problem is difficult to solve, we propose an efficient algorithm to obtain high-quality suboptimal solution for it by applying the alternating optimization, and semidefinite relaxation methods. Simulation results show that the proposed design significantly improves the secrecy communication rate for the considered setup over the case without using the IRS, and outperforms a heuristic scheme.

Subfields: Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Genetics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/ef42978f34e97319874bed77d1b880bf00fdf8ca

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Citations in the corpus

Reconfigurable Intelligent Surfaces: Principles and Opportunities (2020, background): “[151] focused on the scenario where the eavesdropper has a better channel condition than that of the legitimate receiver and both are also highly correlated in space, where the achievable secrecy rate is rather limited in conventional communications.”
Wireless Communications With Reconfigurable Intelligent Surface: Path Loss Modeling and Experimental Measurement (2019, methodology): “The joint beamforming design was also investigated for improving the physical layer security [21], [22].”
Smart Radio Environments Empowered by Reconfigurable Intelligent Surfaces: How It Works, State of Research, and The Road Ahead (2020, background): “In [195], the authors analyze the problem of secrecy rate optimization in an RIS-aided wiretap channel, in which a multi-antenna access point communicates with a singleantenna receiver in the presence of a single-antenna eavesdropper.”
Weighted Sum-Rate Maximization for Reconfigurable Intelligent Surface Aided Wireless Networks (2019, background): “, wireless power transfer [8], [9], physical layer security [10]–[12], cognitive radio network [13], etc.”
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.”
Reconfigurable Intelligent Surfaces for 6G Systems: Principles, Applications, and Research Directions (2021, neutral): “To tackle this issue, in [12], an RIS was deployed in a network operating in the presence of an eavesdropper as shown in Fig.”
Deep Reinforcement Learning-Based Intelligent Reflecting Surface for Secure Wireless Communications (2020, methodology): “The above mentioned studies [14]–[25] mainly applied the”
An Overview of Signal Processing Techniques for RIS/IRS-Aided Wireless Systems (2021, neutral): “…such as mmWave/terahertz systems [84], [89], [142]–[145], multicell systems [101], [146], [147], physical layer security systems [83], [87], [88], [97], [98], [148], [149], simultaneous wireless information and power transfer (SWIPT) [99], [108], [113], [150]–[154], mobile edge…”
The Roadmap to 6G Security and Privacy (2021, background): “For instance, in [146], it is shown the importance of RIS technology for enhancing security, even if the eavesdropping link is in better conditions than the legitimate link.”
Multicell MIMO Communications Relying on Intelligent Reflecting Surfaces (2019, methodology): “Explicitly, a variety of algorithms were proposed to solve the same optimization problem such as the element-wise optimization and alternating optimization schemes of [22], the Charnes-Cooper transformation and SDR techniques of [23], and the alternating algorithm combined with the popular bisection”
Intelligent Reflecting Surface Assisted Secrecy Communication: Is Artificial Noise Helpful or Not? (2019, methodology): “Note that by setting f 2 = 0 (i.e., the case of No-AN, IRS) and K = 1, the setup is the same as that considered in [5].”
Intelligent Reflecting Surface-Aided Wireless Communications: A Tutorial (2020, background): “However, this issue can be efficiently addressed by deploying IRSs in the vicinity of the legitimate/eavesdropping user and properly designing IRS passive beamforming to increase/reduce the achievable rate of the legitimate/eavesdropping user, thus significantly enhancing the achievable secrecy rate”
IRS-Assisted Secure UAV Transmission via Joint Trajectory and Beamforming Design (2022, background): “Motivated by this, there have been considerable works that utilize IRSs in terrestrial wireless networks to boost throughput [21], energy efficiency [22], as well as security [23].”
Beamforming Optimization for Wireless Network Aided by Intelligent Reflecting Surface With Discrete Phase Shifts (2019, background): “The existing works [7], [9], [10], [13]–[17], [34] on”
Intelligent Reflecting Surface Enhanced Wireless Networks: Two-Timescale Beamforming Optimization (2019, background): “multiplexing (OFDM) system [14], [15], IRS-aided mmWave communications [16], physical layer security [17]–[20], wireless power transfer [21]–[24], and so on.”
Intelligent Reflecting Surface: Practical Phase Shift Model and Beamforming Optimization (2019, background): “In future work, it is worth investigating such performance difference in more general IRS-aided wireless communication setups, such as multi-user systems [2], [4], OFDM-based system [17], physical layer security system [18], simultaneous wireless information and power transfer (SWIPT) systems [19], ”
Intelligent Reflecting Surface-Assisted Millimeter Wave Communications: Joint Active and Passive Precoding Design (2019, background): “In [24]–[30], IRS was also considered as an auxiliary facility to assist secret communications, unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) communications and wireless power transfer.”