Joint power control and passive beamforming optimization in RIS-assisted anti-jamming communication

Due to the openness of the wireless propagation environment, wireless networks are highly susceptible to malicious jamming, which significantly impacts their legitimate communication performance. This study investigates a reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS) assisted anti-jamming communication system. Specifically, the objective is to enhance the system’s anti-jamming performance by optimizing the transmitting power of the base station and the passive beamforming of the RIS. Taking into account the dynamic and unpredictable nature of a smart jammer, the problem of joint optimization of transmitting power and RIS reflection coefficients is modeled as a Markov decision process (MDP). To tackle the complex and coupled decision problem, we propose a learning framework based on the double deep Q-network (DDQN) to improve the system achievable rate and energy efficiency. Unlike most power-domain jamming mitigation methods that require information on the jamming power, the proposed DDQN algorithm is better able to adapt to dynamic and unknown environments without relying on the prior information about jamming power. Finally, simulation results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm outperforms multi-armed bandit (MAB) and deep Q-network (DQN) schemes in terms of the anti-jamming performance and energy efficiency.