Movable-Antenna-Enhanced Physical-Layer Service Integration: Performance Analysis and Optimization

Abstract: Movable antennas (MAs) have drawn increasing attention in wireless communications due to their capability to create favorable channel conditions via local movement within a confined region. In this letter, we investigate its application in physical-layer service integration (PHY-SI), where a multi-MA base station (BS) simultaneously transmits both confidential and multicast messages to two users. The multicast message is intended for both users, while the confidential message is intended only for one user and must remain perfectly secure from the other. Our goal is to jointly optimize the secrecy and multicast beamforming, as well as the MAs' positions at the BS to maximize the secrecy rate for one user while satisfying the multicast rate requirement for both users. To gain insights, we first conduct performance analysis of this MA-enhanced PHY-SI system in two special cases, revealing its unique characteristics compared to conventional PHY-SI with fixed-position antennas (FPAs). To address the secrecy rate maximization problem, we propose a two-layer optimization framework that integrates the semidefinite relaxation (SDR) technique and a discrete sampling algorithm. Numerical results demonstrate that MAs can greatly enhance the achievable secrecy rate region for PHY-SI compared to FPAs.