Joint Transmit and Reflective Beamformer Design for Secure Estimation in IRS-Aided WSNs

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are vulnerable to eavesdropping as the sensor nodes (SNs) communicate over an open radio channel. Intelligent reflecting surface (IRS) technology can be leveraged for physical layer security in WSNs. In this paper, we propose a joint transmit and reflective beamformer (JTRB) design for secure parameter estimation at the fusion center (FC) in the presence of an eavesdropper (ED) in a WSN. We develop a semidefinite relaxation (SDR)-based iterative algorithm, which alternately yields the transmit beamformer at each SN and the corresponding reflection phases at the IRS, to achieve the minimum mean-squared error (MSE) parameter estimate at the FC, subject to transmit power and ED signal-to-noise ratio constraints. Our simulation results demonstrate robust MSE and security performance of the proposed IRS-based JTRB technique.