Secure Active Intelligent Reflecting Surface Communication against Colluding Eavesdroppers

An active intelligent reflecting surface (IRS)-assisted, secure, multiple-input–single-output communication method is proposed in this paper. In this proposed scheme, a practical and unfavorable propagation environment is considered by assuming that multiple colluding eavesdroppers (Eves) coexist. In this case, we jointly optimize the beamformers of the base station (BS) and the active IRS for the formulated sum secrecy rate (SSR) maximization problem. Because the formulated problem is not convex, we apply the alternating optimization method to optimize the beamformers for maximizing the SSR. Specifically, we use the semi-definite relaxation method to solve the sub-problem of the beamforming vector of the BS, and we use the successive convex approximation method to solve the sub-problem of the power amplification matrix of the active IRS. Based on the solutions obtained using these stated methods, numerical results show that deploying an active IRS is superior compared to the cases of a passive IRS and a non-IRS for improving the physical layer security of wireless communication with multiple colluding Eves under different settings, such as the numbers of users, Eves, reflecting elements, and BS antennas as well as the maximum transmit power budget at the BS.