Intelligent Reflecting Surface Assists Secure Communication for Correlated MISO Wiretap Channels

Abstract We investigate whether intelligent reflecting surface (IRS) is helpful to improve the secrecy rate of communication when the user’s channel and the wiretap channel are correlated. Furthermore, we study whether the location of the IRS will affect secrecy rate under the correlated wiretap channels. However, due to the constraint of the transmission power and IRS phase shift unit modulus, the problem is not easy to solve. To solve it, we use an alternate optimization algorithm and semidefinite programming (SDP) relaxation. From the simulation results we can observe that IRS could effectively resist the influence of channel correlation and increase secrecy rate on secure communication.