Optimization of Quasi-Static Design for an IRS-Assisted Secure Wireless Communication System

The impacts of channel estimation, beamforming adjustment, phase shift adjustment, and computation costs on an intelligent reflecting surface (IRS)-assisted secure wireless communication system are severe in practice but are usually ignored for simplicity. In this paper, we consider a multi-antenna BS serving a single-antenna legitimate user with the help of a multi-element IRS in the presence of an eavesdropper. To maximally reduce the implementation cost, we investigate the no-instantaneous channel state information (ICSI) case with the legitimate user’s and eavesdropper’s statistical CSI (SCSI). First, we present a SCSI-adaptive (quasi-static) beamforming and phase shift design, also referred to as a quasi-static design, which has low channel estimation, beamforming adjustment, and phase shift adjustment costs. Then, we formulate the maximization of the achievable ergodic secrecy rate with respect to the quasi-static design as a challenging stochastic non-convex problem. Next, we propose two parallel iterative algorithms to obtain a stationary point and an approximate stationary point and present their respective quasi-static designs. Furthermore, we show that the quasi-static designs derived from the stationary point and approximate stationary point achieve lower implementation costs than existing designs. Finally, we numerically verify the analytical results and demonstrate notable gains of the two proposed quasi-static designs over existing designs.