Downlink Power Minimization in Intelligent Reflecting Surface Aided Security Classification Wireless Communications System

User privacy protection is considered a critical issue in wireless networks, which drives the demand for various secure information interaction techniques. In this article, we introduce an intelligent reflecting surface (IRS) aided security classification wireless communication system, which reduces the transmit power of the base station (BS) by classifying users with different security requirements. Specifically, we divide the users into confidential subscribers with secure communication requirements and general communication users with simple communication requirements. During the communication period, we guarantee the secure rate of the confidential subscribers while ensuring the service quality of the general communication users, thereby reducing the transmit power of the BS. To realize such a secure and green information transmission, the BS implements a beamforming design on the transmitted signal superimposed with artificial noise (AN) and then broadcasts it to users with the assistance of the IRS’s reflection. We develop an alternating optimization framework to minimize the BS downlink power with respect to the active beamformers of the BS, the AN vector at the BS, and the reflection phase shifts of the IRS. A successive convex approximation method is proposed so that the nonconvex beamforming problems can be converted to tractable convex forms. The simulation results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm is convergent and can reduce the transmit power by 20% compared to the best benchmark scheme.