Securing Intelligent Reflecting Surface Assisted Terahertz Systems

This paper focuses on securing confidential communication in multiple intelligent reflecting surfaces (IRS) assisted terahertz (THz) systems, where a potential eavesdropper can intercept either the base station (BS)-IRS link or the IRS-user link. Notably, the secure transmission may be intercepted a...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Alouini, M. (Author), Bian, J. (Author), Dong, A. (Author), Qiao, J. (Author), Zhang, C. (Author)
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc. 2022
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Online Access:View Fulltext in Publisher
Description
Summary:This paper focuses on securing confidential communication in multiple intelligent reflecting surfaces (IRS) assisted terahertz (THz) systems, where a potential eavesdropper can intercept either the base station (BS)-IRS link or the IRS-user link. Notably, the secure transmission may be intercepted and blocked by the eavesdropper due to the blockage-prone nature in THz bands. To characterize the blocking effects of the eavesdropper, the blocking-based path loss is first investigated. With the imperfect eavesdropper channel state information (ECSI), the worst-case secrecy rate (WCSR) is derived, and a joint optimization problem of hybrid beamforming at the BS and reflecting beamforming at the IRS is formulated. For the BS-IRS link eavesdropping, the zero-forcing (ZF) principle-based hybrid beamforming and the closed-form phase shifts of multiple IRSs are respectively proposed. For the IRS-user link eavesdropping, an iterative algorithm is proposed to tackle the non-convex optimization problem with a given information leakage threshold. Finally, a robust secure transmission strategy for multi-eavesdropper systems is further investigated. Simulation results demonstrate that compared with blockage-unaware scenarios, our proposed scheme can resist the adverse effects of the blockage-prone nature of THz waves on information security, and significantly boost secrecy performance. Author
ISBN:00189545 (ISSN)
DOI:10.1109/TVT.2022.3172763