Beamforming and Phase Shift Design for HR-IRS-aided Directional Modulation Network with a Malicious Attacker

In this paper, a novel system utilizing a hybrid relay-intelligent reflecting surface (HR-IRS) to boost the security performance of directional modulation (DM) is established. In particular, the malicious attacker works in full-duplex (FD) mode and it will eavesdrop on confidential message (CM) as well as send malicious jamming. To maximize the secrecy rate (SR), a joint problem of optimizing the receive beamforming, transmit beamforming, power allocation (PA) factor, and phase shift matrix (PSM) of HR-IRS is formulated. Since the optimization problem is un-convex and the variables are coupled with each other, we address this problem by iteratively optimizing these variables. First, the receive beamforming is designed based on the generalized Rayleigh-Ritz theorem. Then, the transmit beamforming and PA factor are optimized via Dinkelbach’s Transform and successive convex approximation methods. And for PSM, two strategies, called separate optimization of PSM (SO-PSM) and joint optimization of PSM (JO-PSM), are proposed. Thus, two iterative schemes are proposed accordingly, namely maximizing SR based on SO-PSM (Max-SR-SOP) and maximizing SR based on JO-PSM (Max-SR-JOP). The former has a better performance and the latter has a lower complexity. Simulation results show that given a sufficient power budget of HR-IRS, the proposed Max-SR-SOP and Max-SR-JOP can enable HR-IRS-aided DM network to obtain a higher SR than that aided by passive IRS.