IRS-Aided Energy-Efficient Secure WBAN Transmission Based on Deep Reinforcement Learning

Wireless body area networks (WBANs) are vulnerable to active eavesdropping that simultaneously perform sniffing and jamming to raise the sensor transmit power, and thus steal more healthcare data. In this paper, we propose an intelligent reflecting surface (IRS)-aided reinforcement learning (RL) based secure WBAN transmission scheme that enables the coordinator to jointly optimize the sensor encryption key and transmit power, as well as the IRS phase shifts against active eavesdropping. A Dyna architecture is designed to improve the learning efficiency with the simulated transmission experiences and safe exploration is applied to avoid the risky policies that result in severe data leakage. A deep RL based WBAN transmission scheme is proposed to further improve the secure transmission with lower eavesdropping rate, intercept probability, sensor energy consumption and transmission latency for the coordinators that support deep learning. We analyze the computational complexity and investigate the equilibrium of the secure transmission game between the coordinator and the eavesdropper to provide the performance bounds, which is verified via the simulation results, showing the efficacy of our proposed schemes.