In this work, we study the secrecy performance of a reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RIS)-aided wireless communication system in the presence of an eavesdropping user. Specifically, we assume that the RIS is placed between the source and the legitimate user to create a smart environment and used to improve the link security. In particular, analytical results for the secrecy outage probability (SOP) is derived. We also provide an asymptotic analysis to investigate the effect of the main parameters on the secrecy performance of our proposed system, such as the number of the reflectors in the RIS and the average signal-to-noise ratios. Finally, we verify our analytical results via simulations. Results show the positive effect of utilizing the RIS for enhancing wireless systems secrecy performance.

In this paper, to further improve the coverage and performance of unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) communication systems, we propose a reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS)-assisted UAV scheme where an RIS installed on a building is used to reflect the signals transmitted from the ground source to an UAV, and the UAV is deployed as a relay to forward the decoded signals to the destination. To model the statistical distribution of the RIS-assisted ground-to-air (G2A) links, we develop a tight approximation for the probability density function (PDF) of the instantaneous signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). Thanks to this distribution, analytical expressions of outage probability, average bit error rate (BER), and average capacity are derived. Results show that the use of RISs can effectively improve the coverage and reliability of UAV communication systems.

In this correspondence, we investigate the physical layer security for cooperative non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) systems, where both amplify-and-forward (AF) and decode-and-forward (DF) protocols are considered. More specifically, some analytical expressions are derived for secrecy outage probability (SOP) and strictly positive secrecy capacity (SPSC). Results show that AF and DF almost achieve the same secrecy performance. Moreover, asymptotic results demonstrate that the SOP tends to a constant at high signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). Finally, our results show that the secrecy performance of considered NOMA systems is independent of the channel conditions between the relay and the poor user.

Recent studies have shown that reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RISs) can help in extending the wireless coverage. However, no work has quantitatively analyzed the coverage. In this letter, we present the coverage analysis for an RIS-aided communication system. For comparison, the coverage analysis for relaying systems and direct-link transmission systems are also derived. Furthermore, we provide the analysis for the probability of signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) gain of the RIS over the direct link transmission. Finally, we analyze the delay outage rate of the RIS in achieving ultra-reliable low-latency transmissions. The results show that using the RIS can expand the coverage, increase the SNR gain, and reduce latency of the links.

In this letter, we consider a network assisted by multiple reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RISs). Assuming that the RIS with the highest instantaneous end-to-end signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) is selected to aid the communication, the outage probability (OP) and average sum-rate are investigated. Specifically, an exact analysis for the OP is developed. In addition, relying on the extreme value theory, a closed-form expression for the asymptotic sum-rate is derived, based on which the capacity scaling law is established. Our results are corroborated through simulations and insightful discussions are provided. In particular, our analysis shows that the number of RISs as well as the number of reflecting elements play a crucial role in the capacity scaling law of multiple RIS-aided networks. Also, comparisons with relay-aided systems are carried out to demonstrate that the proposed system setup outperforms relaying schemes both in terms of the OP and average sum-rate.

This paper proposes highly accurate closed-form approximations to channel distributions of two different reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS)-based wireless system setups, namely, dual-hop RIS-aided (RIS-DH) scheme and RIS-aided transmit (RIS-T) scheme. Differently from previous works, the proposed approximations reveal to be very tight for arbitrary number N of reflecting metasurface’s elements. Our findings are then applied to the performance analysis of the considered systems, in which the outage probability, bit error rate, and average channel capacity are derived. Results show that the achievable diversity orders Gd for RIS-DH and RIS-T schemes are N-1<Gd<N and N, respectively. Furthermore, it is revealed that both schemes can not provide the multiplexing gain and only diversity gains are achieved. For the RIS-DH scheme, the channels are similar to the keyhole multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) channels with only one degree of freedom, while the RIS-T scheme is like the transmit diversity structure.