Qingjie Wu, Beixiong Zheng, Guangchi Zhang, Robert Schober
Non-fixed flexible antenna architectures, such as fluid antenna system (FAS), movable antenna (MA), and pinching antenna, have garnered significant interest in recent years. In this paper, we deploy a rotatable antenna (RA) array at the base station (BS) to improve the integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) performance by exploiting the additional spatial degrees of freedom (DoFs) introduced by antenna rotation. To enhance the sensing performance over an extended region containing a potential target while meeting the communication requirements of multiple users, we aim to maximize the minimum echo signal power within the sensing region, subject to required minimum communication rates of the users. For the special case of a single user and a point target, we develop a tractable approximation of the original problem, leading to independent per-RA subproblems. We characterize the geometric structure of these subproblems and derive closed-form solutions. Under the far-field approximation, the per-RA subproblems become approximately identical, allowing a common pointing vector to be adopted for all RAs. For the general multi-user and regional sensing case, we propose an alternating optimization (AO) algorithm that alternately optimizes the transmit beamforming for communication, the covariance matrix of the probing signal, and the pointing vectors of the RAs in an iterative manner. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed RA-enabled ISAC system significantly outperforms various benchmark schemes with restricted antenna-orientation flexibility, while the evaluation of the Cramér-Rao bound (CRB) further verifies its benefits for target-position estimation accuracy.
By exploiting the spatial selectivity of wireless channels, physical layer security (PLS) protects confidential wireless transmissions. Flexible reflectors (FRs), which are passive metallic plates mounted on movable platforms, offer a low-cost and low-complexity solution for reshaping the propagation environment. However, their potential for secrecy-oriented signal propagation shaping has not been explored. In this paper, we study an FR-aided secure communication over non-line-of-sight links and jointly optimize the positions and rotations of FRs to maximize the secrecy rate under geometric reflection and mutual-blocking constraints. For the single-FR case, we propose a Fibonacci segmentation search (FSS) method, which partitions the feasible region into multiple unimodal intervals and obtains the optimal solution with Fibonacci search over the unimodal intervals. To reduce the computational overhead, we also propose a low-complexity cross-entropy search (CES) method, which employs Gaussian mixture model-based adaptive importance sampling to localize promising search intervals before deterministic refinement. After deriving the blocked placement interval induced by the deployed FRs and integrating it into a sequential deployment scheme, we extend the FSS and CES methods to the multi-FR case. Simulation results show that our proposed FSS method achieves significant secrecy rate performance gains over various benchmark schemes, and our proposed CES method achieves a favorable runtime-performance tradeoff. These results indicate that FRs provide a low-cost and reconfigurable mechanism for PLS.