Secure Wireless Communication via Polarforming

Abstract: Polarforming is a promising technique that enables dynamic adjustment of antenna polarization to mitigate depolarization effects commonly encountered during electromagnetic (EM) wave propagation. In this letter, we investigate the polarforming design for secure wireless communication systems, where the base station (BS) is equipped with polarization-reconfigurable antennas (PRAs) and can flexibly adjust the antenna polarization to transmit confidential information to a legitimate user in the presence of an eavesdropper. To maximize the achievable secrecy rate, we propose an efficient iterative algorithm to jointly optimize transmit beamforming and polarforming, where beamforming exploits spatial degrees of freedom (DoFs) to steer the transmit beam toward the user, while polarforming leverages polarization DoFs to align the polarization state of the EM wave received by the user with that of its antenna. Simulation results demonstrate that, compared to conventional fixed-polarization antenna (FPA) systems, polarforming can fully exploit the DoFs in antenna polarization optimization to significantly enhance the security performance of wireless communication systems.