Enhancing Robustness and Security in ISAC Network Design: Leveraging Transmissive Reconfigurable Intelligent Surface With RSMA

In this paper, we propose a novel transmissive reconfigurable intelligent surface (TRIS) transceiver-enhanced robust and secure integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) network. A time-division sensing communication mechanism is designed for the scenario, which enables communication and sensing to share wireless resources. To address the interference management problem and hinder eavesdropping, we implement rate-splitting multiple access (RSMA), where the common stream is designed as a useful signal and an artificial noise (AN), while taking into account the imperfect channel state information and modeling the channel for the illegal users in a fine-grained manner as well as giving an upper bound on the error. We introduce the secrecy outage probability and construct an optimization problem with secrecy sum-rate as the objective functions to optimize the common stream beamforming matrix, the private stream beamforming matrix and the timeslot duration variable. Due to the coupling of the optimization variables and the infinity of the error set, the proposed problem is a nonconvex optimization problem that cannot be solved directly. In order to address the above challenges, the block coordinate descent (BCD)-based second-order cone programming (SOCP) algorithm is used to decouple the optimization variables and solving the problem. Specifically, the problem is decoupled into two subproblems concerning the common stream beamforming matrix, the private stream beamforming matrix, and the timeslot duration variable, which are solved by alternating optimization until convergence is reached. To solve the problem, S-procedure, Bernstein’s inequality and successive convex approximation (SCA) are employed to deal with the objective function and non-convex constraints. Numerical simulation results verify the superiority of the proposed scheme in improving the secrecy energy efficiency (SEE) and the Cramér-Rao boundary (CRB).