Does Movable Antenna Present A Dual-edged Nature? From the Perspective of Physical Layer Security: A Joint Design of Fixed-position Antenna and Movable Antenna

TL;DR

This paper proposes a hybrid antenna system combining fixed and movable antennas to enhance physical layer security in dynamic wireless environments, addressing vulnerabilities of static arrays against mobile eavesdroppers.

Contribution

It introduces a joint design framework for fixed and movable antennas, formulates a non-convex optimization problem, and develops a dual-algorithm solution to maximize secrecy rate.

Findings

Achieves 42.34% secrecy rate improvement over fixed antennas.

Demonstrates the effectiveness of movable antennas in dynamic security enhancement.

Provides a practical joint optimization approach for hybrid antenna deployment.

Abstract

In conventional artificial noise (AN)-aided physical-layer security systems, fixed-position antenna (FPA) arrays exhibit inherent vulnerability to coverage gaps due to their static spatial configuration. Adversarial eavesdroppers can strategically exploit their mobility to infiltrate these spatial nulls of AN radiation patterns, thereby evading interference suppression and successfully intercepting the confidential communication. To overcome this limitation, in this paper, we investigate a hybrid antenna deployment framework integrating FPA arrays and movable antenna (MA) arrays (denoted by FMA co-design) to address the security performance in dynamic wireless environments, based on the fact that MA arrays enable channel reconfiguration through localized antenna repositioning, achieving more higher spatial degree of freedom (DoF). Enabled by FMA co-design framework, FPA arrays ensure baseline connectivity for legitimate links while MA arrays function as dynamic security enhancers, replacing conventional static AN generation. Furthermore, we formulate a non-convex optimization problem of the secrecy rate maximization through jointly optimizing MA positioning, FPA beamforming, and MA beamforming under practical constraints. the solution employs a dual-algorithm approach: Nesterov momentum-based projected gradient ascent (NMPGA) accelerates convergence in continuous position optimization, while alternating optimization (AO) handles coupled beamforming design. Experimental evaluations demonstrate that the proposed FMA co-design framework achieves significant secrecy performance gains over individual optimization benchmarks, yielding 42.34% and 9.12% improvements in secrecy rate compared to isolated FPA for AN generation and MA for confidential information baselines, respectively.