Multistatic Cooperative Sensing Assisted Secure Transmission via IRS

• Published in: IEEE transactions on wireless communications Vol. 24; no. 7; pp. 5752 - 5764
• Main Authors: Yu, Xianglin, Xu, Jinlei, Qin, Xiaoqi, Tang, Jie, Zhao, Nan, Niyato, Dusit
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: New York IEEE 01.07.2025; The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. (IEEE)
• Subjects: Angle of arrival; Array signal processing; Beamforming; Communication system security; Eavesdropping; Integrated sensing and communication; intelligent reflecting surface; Location awareness; Multistatic cooperative sensing; Optimization; Performance enhancement; Quality of service; Reconfigurable intelligent surfaces; Security; sensing assisted communication; Sensors; Wireless communication; Wireless sensor networks
• ISSN: 1536-1276; 1558-2248
• DOI: 10.1109/TWC.2025.3549088

Benefiting from the performance enhancement brought by multistatic cooperative sensing, integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) can capture more environmental information to address the security risk of information leakage caused by the openness of wireless channels. In this paper, we study the multistatic cooperative sensing assisted secure transmission via intelligent reflecting surface (IRS). In particular, we propose a multistatic cooperative sensing scheme to obtain the angle of arrival and the localization of the eavesdropping target to achieve the beam alignment accurately. The goal is to maximize the sum secrecy rate by jointly optimizing the association variables of base station (BS) and users, the BS beamforming and the IRS phase shifts, subject to the requirement of target sensing. Due to the coupling of variables and non-convex objective function, the formulated problem is intractable to solve directly. As such, we decompose it into three subproblems and develop an alternative optimization algorithm to solve them iteratively. The association variables are first optimized by successive convex approximation. Then, the BS transmit beamforming can be derived via the semidefinite relaxation. Finally, we adopt an alternating direction method of multiplier for the IRS phase-shift design. Simulation results indicate the feasibility of the proposed scheme, and the multistatic cooperative sensing via IRS can enhance the sensing performance and guarantee the secure transmission.