Spatial Secrecy Spectral Efficiency Optimization Enabled by Reconfigurable Intelligent Surfaces

Reconfigurable Intelligent Surfaces (RISs) constitute a strong candidate physical-layer technology for the $6$-th Generation (6G) of wireless networks, offering new design degrees of freedom for efficiently addressing demanding performance objectives. In this paper, we consider a Multiple-Input Single-Output (MISO) physical-layer security system incorporating a reflective RIS to safeguard wireless communications between a legitimate transmitter and receiver under the presence of an eavesdropper. In contrast to current studies optimizing RISs for given positions of the legitimate and eavesdropping nodes, in this paper, we focus on devising RIS-enabled secrecy for given geographical areas of potential nodes' placement. We propose a novel secrecy metric, capturing the spatially averaged secrecy spectral efficiency, and present a joint design of the transmit digital beamforming and the RIS analog phase profile, which is realized via a combination of alternating optimization and minorization-maximization. The proposed framework bypasses the need for instantaneous knowledge of the eavesdropper's channel or position, and targets providing an RIS-boosted secure area of legitimate communications with a single configuration of the free parameters. Our simulation results showcase significant performance gains with the proposed secrecy scheme, even for cases where the eavesdropper shares similar pathloss attenuation with the legitimate receiver.