Intelligent Reflecting Surface Assisted Secrecy Communication: Is Artificial Noise Helpful or Not?

TL;DR

This paper examines whether artificial noise enhances secrecy in IRS-assisted wireless systems, finding that combining AN with IRS beamforming improves secrecy rates, especially with multiple eavesdroppers.

Contribution

It introduces an optimization framework for joint beamforming and IRS reflection design, demonstrating the benefits of artificial noise in IRS-assisted secrecy communication.

Findings

Artificial noise improves secrecy rate with IRS.

IRS without AN can perform worse than AN without IRS.

Proposed alternating optimization algorithm effectively solves the problem.

Abstract

In this letter, we investigate whether the use of artificial noise (AN) is helpful to enhance the secrecy rate of an intelligent reflecting surface (IRS) assisted wireless communication system. Specifically, an IRS is deployed nearby a single-antenna receiver to assist in the transmission from a multi-antenna transmitter, in the presence of multiple single-antenna eavesdroppers. Aiming to maximize the achievable secrecy rate, a design problem for jointly optimizing transmit beamforming with AN or jamming and IRS reflect beamforming is formulated, which is however difficult to solve due to its non-convexity and coupled variables. We thus propose an efficient algorithm based on alternating optimization to solve the problem sub-optimally. Simulation results show that incorporating AN in transmit beamforming is beneficial under the new setup with IRS reflect beamforming. In particular, it is unveiled that the IRS-aided design without AN even performs worse than the AN-aided design without IRS as the number of eavesdroppers near the IRS increases.