STAR-RIS-Assisted Information Surveillance Over Suspicious Multihop Communications

Wireless information surveillance has received widespread attention due to the urgency of monitoring growing suspicious communications. This paper considers a challenging surveillance scenario, where the monitor (E) intends to eavesdrop the suspicious multihop communications from a long distance to ensure concealment, leading to the eavesdropping condition undesirable. To tackle this challenging, we propose a novel simultaneously transmitting and reflecting reconfigurable intelligent surface (STAR-RIS)-assisted surveillance strategy, where the STAR-RIS, acts as a “bridge”, is deliberately deployed between the suspicious system and E, to adaptively transmit and reflect the suspicious signal and E's jamming signal, and then facilitate E's eavesdropping. Specifically, we consider the adaptive rate transmission and the delay-limited transmission for the suspicious system, and accordingly maximize E's instantaneous and average eavesdropping rate, by jointly optimizing the passive transmission- and reflection-coefficient matrices at the STAR-RIS, the jamming set and jamming power allocations of E (across all hops). The optimization problems in both transmission modes include numerous integer and continuous variables and thus are highly non-convex. Nevertheless, we show by detailed analysis that the original problem in each mode can be solved by only considering two possible cases, where E and the STAR-RIS intend to enhance and reduce the suspicious transmission rate, respectively. More importantly, in each case, many of necessary prerequisites for achieving the optimal solution are first determined analytically. Armed with these, the optimization problem then can be solved by leveraging the successive convex approximation technique and the simple search. As demonstrated by simulation results, since our proposed strategy is adaptive in term of varying the suspicious transmission rate, it will achieve significant eavesdropping performance gain as compared to other competitive benchmarks.