Enabling Secure Wireless Communications via Intelligent Reflecting Surfaces

Understand

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.