Joint Reconfigurable Intelligent Surface Location and Passive Beamforming Optimization for Maximizing the Secrecy-Rate

The physical layer security (PLS) is investigated for reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS) assisted wireless networks, where a source transmits its confidential information to a legitimate destination with the aid of a single small RIS in the presence of a malicious eavesdropper. A new joint RIS location and passive beamforming (J-LPB) optimization scheme is proposed for the sake of maximizing the secrecy rate under the RIS location constraint and the constraint that the modulus of the reflecting coefficient at each RIS's unit is not larger than 1. Specifically, we analyze the optimal location of the RIS, and conclude that the product involving the source-RIS distance and the RIS-destination distance should be minimized. Since the product minimization problem is nonconvex, we then propose a two-tier optimization algorithm for solving it. Based on the near-optimal RIS 3D location obtained, we further formulate the passive beamforming optimization problem, and then propose to apply the Charnes-Cooper transformation along with the sequential rank-one constraint relaxation (SROCR) algorithm to solve it. Our numerical results show that the secrecy rate of the proposed J-LPB optimization scheme is higher than that of the benchmarks. Explicitly, we use the following benchmarks: the near-source-based RIS location and passive beamforming (NSB-LPB) optimization scheme, the near-destination-based RIS location and passive beamforming (NDB-LPB) optimization scheme, and the random RIS location and passive beamforming (R-LPB) optimization scheme. Finally, the benefits of our J-LPB scheme are further increased with the number of RIS units.