Physical Layer Security of Large Reflecting Surface Aided Communications with Phase Errors

TL;DR

This paper analyzes the physical layer security of large reflecting surface aided wireless communications with phase errors, showing potential for enhanced security even with practical phase quantization.

Contribution

It introduces a model for LRS-based channels with phase errors, revealing the eavesdropper's link as Rayleigh distributed and demonstrating security benefits with large numbers of reflecting elements.

Findings

Eavesdropper's link is Rayleigh distributed and independent of legitimate link.

Signal-to-noise ratios scale differently for legitimate and eavesdropper links.

Good security performance persists even with coarse phase quantization.

Abstract

The physical layer security (PLS) performance of a wireless communication link through a large reflecting surface (LRS) with phase errors is analyzed. Leveraging recent results that express the \ac{LRS}-based composite channel as an equivalent scalar fading channel, we show that the eavesdropper's link is Rayleigh distributed and independent of the legitimate link. The different scaling laws of the legitimate and eavesdroppers signal-to-noise ratios with the number of reflecting elements, and the reasonably good performance even in the case of coarse phase quantization, show the great potential of LRS-aided communications to enhance PLS in practical wireless set-ups.