Robust Secure Beamforming Design for GEO-Based Satellite Communication Systems

Compared with terrestrial communication, satellite communication has played a crucial role in 6G communication as a result of wide-area coverage characteristics. Among them, beamforming scheduling and information security are critical research issues to improve system transmission performance. However, in geostationary earth orbit (GEO)-based satellite communication systems, owing to the wide-area coverage, ground users are susceptible to inter-beam interference caused by multibeam antennas at the satellite, and the information received by terrestrial users may be eavesdropped by air or terrestrial eavesdroppers. To this end, in this article, we propose a new robust security transmission strategy by combining beamforming and artificial noise (AN) techniques. Specifically, based on the actual satellite communication network scenario, the uncertain channel models are formulated as bounded uncertainty sets by considering the impact of imperfect channel state information of both legitimate and wiretap channels. Then, we build a bounded-constrained beamforming optimization to maximize the sum rate of legitimate users, while guaranteeing the constraints of total transmit power on the satellite and the minimum security rate of each legitimate user. Since the original problem is non-convex and mathematically intractable, we jointly exploit the successive convex approximation, Taylor series expansion, S-Procedure, and the semi-definite relaxation approach, with which the original problem can be transformed into a tractable one with a series of linear matrix inequality constraints. Furthermore, we propose an iterative algorithm to obtain the optimal beamforming and AN vectors. Finally, simulation results show that, compared with the existing algorithms, the proposed algorithm has better security and robustness.