Enabling Secure Wireless Communications for FARIS-Aided Systems

Abstract

This paper investigates secure downlink transmission assisted by a fluid active reconfigurable intelligent surface (FARIS), which enables both active reflection and dynamic port selection, offering enhanced flexibility for physical-layer security. We formulate a secrecy rate maximization problem that jointly optimizes the transmit beamformer, active reflection coefficients, and fluid port configuration under practical power constraints. To efficiently handle the resulting highly nonconvex problem, we develop a tailored alternating optimization (AO) framework that decomposes the original joint design into tractable subproblems, where each admits an efficient solution while preserving the system constraints, enabling an effective joint optimization of beamforming and FARIS reconfiguration. Numerical results demonstrate that the proposed FARIS-assisted design consistently outperforms the benchmarks. The results further highlight the robustness of FARIS against unfavorable eavesdropping geometries, confirming its potential as a powerful enabler for secure communications in challenging environments.