IRS-Aided Secure Communications Over an Untrusted AF Relay System

Abstract

In this paper, an intelligent reflecting surface (IRS) assisted wireless secure communication system is studied. A multi-antenna access point (AP) intends to send confidential information to a single-antenna user in the presence of an amplify-and-forward (AF) untrusted relay, which may eavesdrop the message when helping relay the signal. It is assumed that the direct link between the AP and the user is blocked by the obstacles. The achievable secrecy rate maximization problem is then formulated. To overcome the non-convexity of the formulated problem, an alternating iteration algorithm is proposed to jointly optimize the active and passive beamforming. Specifically, the transmit beamforming vector at the AP, the phase shift matrix at the IRS, and the relay beamforming matrix are jointly optimized to maximize the secrecy rate. Moreover, the asymptotic expressions for the maximum secrecy rates of the proposed scheme in the high and low transmitted signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) regimes are derived as well. Finally, numerical evaluations demonstrate the superiority of the proposed scheme compared with other benchmark schemes, highlight the importance of properly designed phase shifts at the IRS, and validate the theoretical analysis. It is also demonstrated that the number of antennas at the AP should be strictly larger than the number of antennas at the relay to harvest the benefits of increasing the transmit power at the AP in increasing the secrecy rate.