article · IEEE Communications Surveys & Tutorials
Physical layer security offers data confidentiality without key distribution or conventional encryption, reducing latency compared to bit-level cryptographic methods. As future wireless networks evolve towards sixth-generation technology, reconfigurable intelligent surfaces offer a way to proactively reshape transmission environments against channel impairments. This approach can enhance information-theoretic security across both radio frequency and optical wireless communications. However, implementing these surfaces in radio systems differs significantly from optical systems regarding materials, signal properties, and operational functions. Integrating reconfigurable surfaces into high-density networks increases computational complexity, making machine learning an attractive solution to maintain performance while managing calculations. A review of these combined architectures highlights design optimisations, performance assessments, and remaining technical challenges essential for realising secure, next-generation wireless infrastructure.
Future telecommunications networks require robust data privacy and low transmission delays. Physical layer security combined with reconfigurable intelligent surfaces protects sensitive communications by shaping the physical environment directly, rather than relying solely on traditional encryption software. Understanding how this integration works across radio and optical media helps researchers build faster, more secure connectivity for upcoming wireless generations such as 6G.
This work addresses foundational network security for telecommunications equipment manufacturers and network operators planning sixth-generation infrastructure. The concepts apply to both radio frequency and optical wireless communications requiring high confidentiality and low latency. Because the abstract details a survey covering optimisation, performance analysis, and unresolved research challenges, the technology represents early-stage conceptual and analytical research rather than an immediately deployable commercial product.
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Security and latency are crucial aspects in the design of future wireless networks. Physical layer security (PLS) has received a growing interest from the research community in recent years for its ability to safeguard data confidentiality without relying on key distribution or encryption/decryption, and for its latency advantage over bit-level cryptographic techniques. However, the evolution towards the fifth generation wireless technology and beyond poses new security challenges that must be addressed in order to fulfill the unprecedented performance requirements of future wireless communications networks. Among the potential key-enabling technologies, reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS) has attracted extensive attention due to its ability to proactively and intelligently reconfigure the wireless propagation environment to combat dynamic channel impairments. Consequently, the RIS technology can be adopted to improve the information-theoretic security of both radio frequency (RF) and optical wireless communications (OWC) systems. It is worth noting that the configuration of RIS in RF communications is different from that in optical systems at many levels (e.g., RIS materials, signal characteristics, and functionalities). This survey article provides a comprehensive overview of the information-theoretic security of RIS-based RF and optical systems. The article first discusses the fundamental concepts of PLS and RIS technologies, followed by their combination in both RF and OWC systems. Subsequently, some optimization techniques are presented in the context of the underlying system model, followed by an assessment of the impact of RIS-assisted PLS through a comprehensive performance analysis. Given that the computational complexity of future communications systems that adopt RIS-assisted PLS is likely to increase rapidly as the number of interactions between the users and infrastructure grows, machine learning (ML) is seen as a promising approach to address this complexity issue while sustaining or improving the network performance. A discussion of recent research studies on RIS-assisted PLS-based systems embedded with ML is presented. Furthermore, some important open research challenges are proposed and discussed to provide insightful future research directions, with the aim of moving a step closer towards the development and implementation of the forthcoming sixth-generation (6G) wireless technology.
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DOI: 10.1109/comst.2024.3487112
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