A Reconfigurable Phase-Time Array Transmitter Achieving Keyless Secured Transmission and Multi-Receiver Localization for Low-Latency Joint Communication and Sensing

The vast available spectrum at millimeter-wave (mm-Wave)/terahertz (THz) frequencies is envisioned as a key enabler to solve the ever-increasing data rate needs in crowded urban environments and lead the next wireless technology revolution. To overcome the high path loss present at mm-Wave/THz, highly directional antenna arrays have become ubiquitous. Their future large-scale deployment will naturally create dense wireless sensor networks, which in-turn enable joint communication and sensing. However, the beamforming of high-directivity antenna arrays relies on real-time precise localization between transmitters (TXs) and receivers (RXs) to ensure robustness in dynamic mobile applications. Moreover, traditional digital encryption and decryption at multi-Gbps data rate cause large power and latency overhead, and thus, wireless physical layer security has become a promising solution. In this article, we propose and demonstrate a reconfigurable phase-time array (PTA) TX with prism-like spectral-to-spatial mapping of wideband transmitted signals, which achieves keyless physically secured wireless communication and fast multi-RX localization to enable low-latency joint communication and sensing within the same wireless electronics frontend. The PTA realizes reconfigurable spectral-to-spatial mapping by applying both a phase shift and true time delay (TTD) at each array element. This intentionally creates and exploits the array beam squinting effect, such that different frequency components of a wideband signal are transmitted in different directions, analogous to an optical prism. Therefore, multiple RX nodes can simultaneously determine their angular positions relative to the TX array using their received signals for fast multi-RX localization. Judiciously engineering the prism-like beam squinting in PTA TX can also selectively distort signal transmission to unwanted directions for secured communication without cryptography. Furthermore, the PTA scheme can reconfigure its element-level phase-time delay combinations to attain variable levels of communication security and localization/sensing performance depending on the needs.