Performance Analysis of IRS-Assisted Wireless Communication in Presence of Single and Multiple Eavesdroppers

In this work, we analyze the error performance and the security performance of intelligent reflecting surface (IRS)-assisted wireless communication systems. In particular, a single-antenna transmitter sends information signals to a single-antenna receiver via IRS in the presence of single and multiple eavesdroppers. It is assumed that the channel state information (CSI) of the transmitter-to-IRS’s and IRS-to-receiver’s channels is perfectly known to the IRS. We investigate the performance of optimized IRS based transmission in terms of bit error rate (BER) as well as secrecy capacity considering Rayleigh fading. The simulation results demonstrate that optimized IRS based transmission scheme appreciably enhances the BER and the secrecy capacity of the designed system compared to the blind transmission scheme. Furthermore, our results show that with the increase in number of reflecting elements, the BER and secrecy capacity improves.