Secrecy Energy Efficiency Maximization for Distributed Intelligent-Reflecting-Surface-Assisted MISO Secure Communications

This article investigates energy-efficient secure communication design with the help of multiple phase-adjustable intelligent reflecting surfaces (IRSs). By creating desirable radiation patterns of wireless environment, the IRSs are used to significantly improve the number of bits securely delivered to the destination per energy consumption in Joule, also known as the secrecy energy efficiency (SEE). By manipulating the discrete reflecting coefficients of multiple IRSs and taking advantage of the active beamforming, this article develops an efficient alternating optimization algorithm based on successive convex approximation and penalty-based techniques to effectively fight against multiple eavesdroppers. Simulation results characterize the graceful tradeoff between conflicting performance metrics, i.e., total power consumption and secrecy rate in the multi-IRS-aided secure communication system, and corroborate that incorporating multiple IRSs is beneficial to both the SEE and secrecy rate enhancement compared to existing related benchmarks.