Robust and Secure Beamforming Design for STAR-RIS-Enabled IoE ISAC Systems

Due to the sharing of communication and sensing signals, integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) systems are vulnerable to potential eavesdropping attacks. This article investigates simultaneously transmitting and reflecting reconfigurable intelligent surface (STAR-RIS)-enabled secure ISAC for Internet of Everything (IoE) networks. Two typical ISAC scenarios are explored: 1) communication enhancement (CE) and 2) communication-sensing fusion (CSF). In the CE scenario, the communication user (CU) is located in the Non-Line of Sight (NLoS) region of the ISAC base station (ISAC-BS), while the sensing target is located in the Line-of-Sight (LoS) region of the ISAC-BS. In the CSF scenario, both the CU and the sensing target are located in the NLoS region of the BS. The STAR-RIS is deployed to improve communication and sensing performance. The artificial noise (AN)-aided robust and secure beamforming problems are formulated for different scenarios based on imperfect channel knowledge. Several STAR-RIS protocols are also considered to provide a more complete system design and performance analysis. Efficient iteration-based algorithms are developed to solve these nonconvex and highly coupled problems. Based on simulation results, we observe that: 1) the proposed methods can effectively improve the system performance and 2) from the perspective of communication security, the dedicated AN signal is helpful for STAR-RIS-enabled ISAC systems.