Antifragility of RIS-assisted Communication Systems under Jamming Attacks

Abstract: Antifragility of communication systems is defined as measure of benefits gained from the adverse events and variability of its environment. In this paper, we introduce the notion of antifragility in Reconfigurable Intelligent Surface (RIS) assisted communication systems affected by a jamming attack. We analyzed the antifragility of the two hop systems, where the wireless path contains source node, RIS, destination node, and a eavesdropping/jamming node. We propose and analyze the antifragility performance for several jamming models, such as Digital Radio Frequency Memory (DRFM) and phase and amplitude shifting. Our paper shows that antifragility throughput can indeed be achieved under certain power thresholds and for various jamming models. In particular, high jamming power combined with low baseline data rates yields an antifragile gain factor of approximately five times. The results confirm that reconfigurable intelligent surfaces, when coupled with an antifragile design philosophy, can convert hostile interference from a liability into a throughput gain.