Enhancing Physical Layer Security in Dual-Function Radar-Communication Systems with Hybrid Beamforming Architecture

Abstract: In this letter, we investigate enhancing the physical layer security (PLS) for the dual-function radar-communication (DFRC) system with hybrid beamforming (HBF) architecture, where the base station (BS) achieves downlink communication and radar target detection simultaneously. We consider an eavesdropper intercepting the information transmitted from the BS to the downlink communication users with imperfectly known channel state information. Additionally, the location of the radar target is also imperfectly known by the BS. To enhance PLS in the considered DFRC system, we propose a novel HBF architecture, which introduces a new integrated sensing and security (I2S) symbol. The secure HBF design problem for DFRC is formulated by maximizing the minimum legitimate user communication rate subject to radar signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio, eavesdropping rate, hardware and power constraints. To solve this non-convex problem, we propose an alternating optimization based method to jointly optimize transmit and receive beamformers. Numerical simulation results validate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm and show the superiority of the proposed I2S-aided HBF architecture for achieving DFRC and enhancing PLS.