Artificial-Noise-Aided Secure Near-Field MIMO With Fluid Antenna Systems

TL;DR

This paper introduces an artificial-noise aided physical layer security scheme for near-field fluid antenna MIMO systems, leveraging geometry and position-domain degrees of freedom to enhance secrecy performance in future mobile networks.

Contribution

It proposes a novel joint design framework combining beamforming, artificial noise, and port selection for secure near-field fluid antenna MIMO systems, with practical hybrid architecture implementation.

Findings

The scheme significantly improves secrecy performance over traditional methods.

Closed-form solutions for beamforming and artificial noise are derived.

Simulation results show effectiveness especially for non-extremely-large arrays.

Abstract

With the evolution of mobile communication systems toward large-scale arrays, high-frequency operation, and reconfigurable antenna architectures, fluid antenna systems (FAS) operating in the near-field (NF) regime provide new degrees of freedom (DoF) for secure and privacy-sensitive mobile access. This paper proposes an artificial-noise (AN)-aided physical layer security (PLS) scheme for NF fluid-antenna multiple-input multiple-output (FA-MIMO) systems, aiming to protect high-rate mobile service links supported by compact or large arrays. An alternating-optimization (AO) framework addresses the sparsity-constrained non-convex design by splitting it into a continuous BF/AN joint-design subproblem and a discrete FAS port-selection subproblem. Closed-form fully digital beamforming (BF)/AN solutions are obtained via a generalized spectral water-filling procedure within a block coordinate descent (BCD) surrogate and realized by a hardware-consistent hybrid beamforming (HBF) architecture with a shared RF network and independent digital BF/AN branches, while preserving the target BF/AN power split under constant-modulus RF constraints. For FAS port selection, a row-energy based prune--refit rule, aligned with Karush--Kuhn--Tucker (KKT) conditions of a group-sparsity surrogate, enables efficient active-port determination under a finite RF-chain budget. Simulation results confirm that the proposed design exploits the geometry and position-domain DoF of FAS and significantly improves secrecy performance, particularly for non-extremely-large arrays where NF beam focusing alone is inadequate. These results demonstrate the potential of AN-aided NF FA-MIMO as a practical secure-transmission architecture for future location-aware and hardware-constrained mobile computing systems.