Secrecy Outage Probability Fairness for Intelligent Reflecting Surface-Assisted Uplink Channel

TL;DR

This paper addresses physical layer security in IRS-assisted uplink channels by minimizing the maximum secrecy outage probability among users, using an alternating optimization approach, leading to improved security performance.

Contribution

It introduces a novel formulation for minimizing the maximum secrecy outage probability in IRS-assisted uplink channels, which was not addressed in prior work.

Findings

Significant reduction in maximum secrecy outage probability with the proposed algorithm.

The scheme outperforms max-min SINR strategies in security performance.

Simulation results validate the effectiveness of the optimization approach.

Abstract

This paper investigates physical layer security (PLS) in the intelligent reflecting surface (IRS)-assisted multiple-user uplink channel. Since the instantaneous eavesdropper's channel state information (CSI) is unavailable, the secrecy rate can not be measured. In this case, existing investigations usually focus on the maximization of the minimum (max-min) of signal to interference plus noise power ratio (SINRs) among multiple users, and do not consider secrecy outage probability caused by eavesdroppers. In this paper, we first formulate the minimization of the maximum (min-max) secrecy outage probability among multiple users. The formulated problem is solved by alternately optimizing receiving matrix and phase shift matrix. Simulations demonstrate that the maximum secrecy outage probability is significantly reduced with the proposed algorithm compared to max-min SINR strategies, meaning our scheme has a higher security performance.