Movable-Element STARS-Aided Secure Communications

A novel movable-element (ME) enabled simultaneously transmitting and reflecting surface (ME-STARS)-aided secure communication system is investigated. Against the full-space eavesdropping, MEs are deployed at the STARS for enhancing the physical layer security by exploiting higher spatial degrees of freedom. Specifically, a sum secrecy rate maximization problem is formulated, which jointly optimizes the passive beamforming and the MEs positions at the ME-STARS, as well as the active beamforming at the base station. To solve the resultant non-convex optimization problem involving highly-coupled variables, an alternating optimization-based iterative algorithm is developed, decomposing the original problem into three subproblems. In particular, for the MEs position optimization subproblem, a gradient ascent algorithm is employed to iteratively refine the MEs' locations within the confined region. Moreover, the active and passive beamforming subproblems are solved by employing successive convex approximation. Numerical results unveil that: 1) ME-STARS improves the secrecy performance by around $25\%$ over the conventional STARS with fixed-position elements; and 2) the secrecy rate achieved by the ME-STARS gets saturated within limited movable region size.