RIS Strategies for Secure Communications: Balancing Resources and Channel Aging

Reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RIS) have emerged as a promising approach to enhance the secrecy performance of wireless networks from a physical layer security perspective. However, its effectiveness critically depends on the availability of accurate instantaneous channel state information (CSI) at the RIS controller. This work evaluates the impact of outdated CSI on the secrecy performance of a multiple RIS-aided wireless network. To this end, a closed-form expression for the secrecy outage probability (SOP) is derived assuming the availability of an outdated CSI at the RIS controller. The obtained results demonstrate the network’s secrecy degradation level due to the CSI outdatedness, while the increase in the number of RISs can compensate for such a secrecy loss. For instance, incorporating three RISs improves the SOP by two orders of magnitude with respect to a single RIS for 25% of CSI outdatedness. Furthermore, the results reveal that, under specific scenarios of several channel outdatedness, a baseline single RIS with a perfect CSI can outperform multiple RISs with outdated CSI. These findings highlight a critical limitation in incorporating multiple RISs in a wireless network with severe channel aging, requiring the increase of the RISs size or the number of RISs to combat its effect.