ZTE

ZTE Communications ›› 2025, Vol. 23 ›› Issue (1): 11-17.DOI: 10.12142/ZTECOM.202501003

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RIS Enabled Simultaneous Transmission and Key Generation with PPO: Exploring Security Boundary of RIS Phase Shift

FAN Kaiqing1, YAO Yuze1, GAO Ning1(), LI Xiao2, JIN Shi2   

  1. 1.School of Cyber Science and Engineering, Southeast University, Nanjing 210096, China
    2.National Mobile Communications Research Laboratory, Southeast University, Nanjing 210096, China
  • Received:2025-01-25 Online:2025-03-25 Published:2025-03-25
  • About author:FAN Kaiqing received his BS degree in computer science from Nanjing University of Finance and Economics, China in 2023. He is currently pursuing his MS degree with the School of Cyber Science and Engineering, Southeast University, China. His research interests are RIS-assisted physical layer security and deep reinforcement learning.
    YAO Yuze received his BS degree in information security from China University of Mining and Technology, China in 2023. He is currently pursuing his MS degree with the School of Cyber Science and Engineering, Southeast University, China. His research interests include wireless communication security and deep reinforcement learning.
    GAO Ning (ninggao@seu.edu.cn) received his PhD degree in information and communications engineering from Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, China in 2019. From 2017 to 2018, he was a visiting PhD student with the School of Computing and Communications, Lancaster University, UK. From 2019 to 2022, he was a research fellow with the National Mobile Communications Research Laboratory, Southeast University, China. He is currently an associate professor with the School of Cyber Science and Engineering, Southeast University. His research interests include AI enabled wireless communications and security, reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RIS), and UAV communications.
    LI Xiao received her PhD degree in communication and information systems from Southeast University, China in 2010. Then, she joined the School of Information Science and Engineering, Southeast University, where she has been a professor of information systems and communications since July 2020. From January 2013 to January 2014, she was a postdoctoral fellow at The University of Texas at Austin, USA. Her current research interests include massive MIMO, reconfigurable intelligent surface assisted communications, and intelligent communications. She was a recipient of the 2013 National Excellent Doctoral Dissertation of China for her PhD dissertation.
    JIN Shi received his PhD degree in communications and information systems from Southeast University, China in 2007. From June 2007 to October 2009, he was a research fellow with the Adastral Park Research Campus, University College London, UK. He is currently a faculty member with the National Mobile Communications Research Laboratory, Southeast University. His research interests include wireless communications, random matrix theory, and information theory. He was an associate editor of IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications, IEEE Communications letters, and IET Communications. He serves as an area editor of IEEE Transactions on Communications and IET Electronics Letters.
  • Supported by:
    the National Science Foundation of China (NSFC)(62371131);the National Key R&D Program of China(2024YFE0200700);the program of Zhishan Young Scholar of Southeast University(2242024RCB0030)

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Abstract:

Due to the broadcast nature of wireless channels and the development of quantum computers, the confidentiality of wireless communication is seriously threatened. In this paper, we propose an integrated communications and security (ICAS) design to enhance communication security using reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RIS), in which the physical layer key generation (PLKG) rate and the data transmission rate are jointly considered. Specifically, to deal with the threat of eavesdropping attackers, we focus on studying the simultaneous transmission and key generation (STAG) by configuring the RIS phase shift. Firstly, we derive the key generation rate of the RIS assisted PLKG and formulate the optimization problem. Then, in light of the dynamic wireless environments, the optimization problem is modeled as a finite Markov decision process. We put forward a policy gradient-based proximal policy optimization (PPO) algorithm to optimize the continuous phase shift of the RIS, which improves the convergence stability and explores the security boundary of the RIS phase shift for STAG. The simulation results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm outperforms the benchmark method in convergence stability and system performance. By reasonably allocating the weight factors for the data transmission rate and the key generation rate, “one-time pad” communication can be achieved. The proposed method has about 90% performance improvement for “one-time pad” communication compared with the benchmark methods.

Key words: reconfigurable intelligent surfaces, physical layer key generation, integrated communications and security, one-time pad, deep reinforcement learning