Intelligent reflecting surface enhanced secure transmission against both jamming and eavesdropping attacks

Both the jammer and the eavesdropper pose severe threat to wireless communications due to the broadcast nature of wireless channels. In this paper, an intelligent reflecting surface (IRS) assisted secure communication system is considered, where a base station (BS) wishes to reliably convey information to a user, in the presence of both a jammer and an eavesdropper whose transmit informations are not completely known. Specifically, with the imperfect third-party node's channel state information (CSI) and no knowledge of the jammer's transmit beamforming, we aim to maximize the system achievable rate by jointly designing the BS's transmit beamforming and the IRS's reflect beamforming, while limiting the information leakage to the potential eavesdropper. Due to the non-convexity and intractability of the original problem induced by the incompleted information, we utilize the auxiliary variables, Cauchy-Schwarz inequality, and General Sign-Definiteness transformation to convert the original optimization problem into a tractable convex optimization problem, and then obtain the high-quality optimal solution by using the successive convex approximation and penalty convex concave procedure. Numerical simulations demonstrate the superiority of our proposed optimization algorithm compared with existing approaches, and also reveal the impact of key parameters on the achievable system performance.