Secrecy Performance Analysis of RIS-Enabled Wireless Networks Over Rayleigh Fading Channels

This paper examines the secrecy performance of reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS)-enabled wireless communication systems. In particular, a wiretap communication system is considered which consists of a RIS-enabled access point comprising a large number of reflector elements, a legitimate destination, and a passive eavesdropper. For the considered system setup, we present the exact closed-form expressions for the secrecy outage probability (SOP), intercept probability, and probability of non-zero secrecy capacity assuming the Rayleigh fading scenario. We further reveal critical insights into the system’s diversity order by assessing the asymptotic SOP expressions for two cases; 1) when the signal-to-noise ratio approaches infinity, and 2) when the main-to-eavesdropper ratio tends to infinity. Finally, the theoretical analysis is validated via numerical and simulation studies. Our results reveal that the system’s secrecy performance is greatly affected by the increase in the number of reflecting elements.