Securing Near-Field Wideband MIMO Communications via True-Time Delayer-Based Hybrid Beamfocusing

This paper investigates physical layer secure communication in a wideband wireless system, where a base station (BS) equipped with an extremely large scale antenna array (ELAA) transmits confidential information to a legitimate receiver under the threat of a potential eavesdropper. Due to the high carrier frequency and large antenna aperture, both the receiver and eavesdropper lie in the near-field region of the BS. In order to mitigate the beam split effect and reduce the hardware cost, a true-time delayer-based hybrid beamfocusing architecture is designed. Then, a nonconvex sum secrecy capacity maximization problem (SSCM) is formulated for securing wideband communications. Based on alternating optimization, the SSCM is decomposed into three subproblems solved iteratively for designing the digital beamfocusing vectors, time delay matrices, and phase shift matrices on each subcarrier, respectively. Simulation results show that the proposed scheme yields significantly high secrecy capacity compared to benchmarks, which validates the effectiveness of our scheme in enhancing secure wideband communications and mitigating the beam split effects.