Pinching-Antenna Systems-enabled Secure ISAC: A Two-Timescale Optimization Framework

Abstract

A novel two-timescale optimization framework is proposed for pinching-antenna systems (PASS)-enabled secure integrated sensing and communications (ISAC). Specifically, a base station (BS) equipped with pinching antennas (PAs) transmits signals to a legitimate user under the existence of an eavesdropper (Eve), while employing leaky coaxial cables (LCXs) for receiving echo signals to track Eve's mobility states, i.e., locations and velocities. Considering the practical PAs activation overhead, the pinching beamforming and baseband processing are optimized in the large and small timescales, respectively. The multiple-waveguide scenario is first considered, where the BS can transmit the artificial noise together with communication signals for both jamming and sensing purposes. A joint baseband and pinching beamforming design problem is formulated to maximize the average secrecy rate. To address this problem, an alternating optimization algorithm is first invoked for jointly optimizing the pinching and baseband beamforming with predicted Eve's mobility states. With determined PAs positions, the baseband beamforming is updated with refined Eve's states obtained from real-time echo signal processing. The single-waveguide scenario is then considered. Since a single waveguide carries at most one independent data stream, an ISAC framework with separate communication and sensing phases is proposed. The element-wise algorithm proposed for the multiple-waveguide scenario is extended to solve the resultant pinching beamforming problem. Numerical results demonstrate that: 1) Eve's velocities and positions can be accurately tracked with the proposed two-timescale framework in both multiple- and single-waveguide scenarios; and 2) PASS achieves superior secrecy rate compared to conventional multiple-antenna benchmarks.