Movable Antenna Empowered Secure Near-Field MIMO Communications

Abstract: This paper investigates movable antenna (MA) empowered secure transmission in near-field multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) communication systems, where the base station (BS) equipped with an MA array transmits confidential information to a legitimate user under the threat of a potential eavesdropper. To enhance physical layer security (PLS) of the considered system, we aim to maximize the secrecy rate by jointly designing the hybrid digital and analog beamformers, as well as the positions of MAs at the BS. To solve the formulated non-convex problem with highly coupled variables, an alternating optimization (AO)-based algorithm is introduced by decoupling the original problem into two separate subproblems. Specifically, for the subproblem of designing hybrid beamformers, a semi-closed-form solution for the fully-digital beamformer is first derived by a weighted minimum mean-square error (WMMSE)-based algorithm. Subsequently, the digital and analog beamformers are determined by approximating the fully-digital beamformer through the manifold optimization (MO) technique. For the MA positions design subproblem, we utilize the majorization-minimization (MM) algorithm to iteratively optimize each MA's position while keeping others fixed. Extensive simulation results validate the considerable benefits of the proposed MA-aided near-field beam focusing approach in enhancing security performance compared to the traditional far-field and/or the fixed position antenna (FPA)-based systems. In addition, the proposed scheme can realize secure transmission even if the eavesdropper is located in the same direction as the user and closer to the BS.