Near-field Liquid Crystal RIS Phase-Shift Design for Secure Wideband Illumination

Abstract

Liquid crystal (LC) technology provides a low-power and scalable approach to implement a reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS). However, the LC-based RIS's phase-shift response is inherently frequency-dependent, which can lead to performance degradation if not properly addressed. This issue becomes especially critical in secure communication systems, where such variations may result in considerable information leakage. To avoid the need for full channel state information (CSI) acquisition and frequent RIS reconfiguration, we design RIS for a wideband orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) system to illuminate a desired area containing legitimate users while avoiding leakage to regions where potential eavesdroppers may be located. Our simulation results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm improves the secrecy rate compared to methods that neglect frequency-dependent effects. In the considered setup, the proposed method achieves a secrecy rate of about 2 bits/symbol over an 8 GHz bandwidth when the center frequency is 60 GHz.