RIS-Assisted Green Secure Communications: Active RIS or Passive RIS?

• Published in: IEEE wireless communications letters Vol. 12; no. 2; pp. 237 - 241
• Main Authors: Lv, Weigang, Bai, Jiale, Yan, Qingli, Wang, Hui Ming
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Piscataway IEEE 01.02.2023; The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. (IEEE)
• Subjects: active RIS; Algorithms; Artificial intelligence; Base stations; Beamforming; Computational geometry; Convexity; double fading; Fading; Fading channels; Minimization; Optimization; Reconfigurable intelligent surface; Reflection; secrecy rate; transmit power; Wireless communication; Wireless communications
• ISSN: 2162-2337; 2162-2345
• DOI: 10.1109/LWC.2022.3221609

Reconfigurable Intelligent Surface (RIS) is one of the promising techniques for 6G wireless communications, and recently has also been shown to be able to improve secure communications. However, there is a "double fading" effect in the reflection link between base station and user, thus passive RIS only achieves a negligible secrecy gain in typical communications scenarios. In this letter, we propose an active RIS-aided multi-antenna physical layer secrecy transmission scheme, where the active RIS can amplify the signal actively. Our aim is to minimize the transmit power subject to the constraint of secrecy rate. To solve the non-convex optimization problem, a penalty-based alternating minimization (AltMin) algorithm is proposed to optimize both the beamformer at the transmitter and the reflection matrix at RIS. Simulation results show that active RIS can resist the impact of "double fading" effect effectively, and is more energy efficient than passive RIS.