Secure and Green RSMA-Assisted Heterogeneous ISAC

This paper investigates sensing, communication, security, and energy efficiency of the heterogeneous integrated sensing and communication networks under challenging operational conditions. We focus on scenarios in which communication performance, security, and sensing accuracy are degraded by interference, eavesdropping, and imperfect channel state information. To this end, we analyze communication and sensing signals within ISAC framework as well as the communication signals of a multicast network based on rate-splitting multiple access (RSMA). Then, sensing signal-to-cluster-plus-noise ratio, communication rate, security rate, and security energy efficiency (SEE) are evaluated. To simultaneously enhance these system performances, we propose a targeted optimization framework aimed at maximizing SEE. This framework characterizes the sensing-security trade-off by jointly optimizing the transmit beamforming (BF) vectors and the echo BF vector to construct green interference using the echo signal, as well as common and private streams generated by RSMA. Particularly, the joint design improves the security rate and reduces power consumption, thereby enabling a higher SEE. Given the non-convex nature of the optimization problem, we present an alternative approach that leverages Taylor series expansion, majorization-minimization, semi-definite programming, and successive convex approximation techniques. Specifically, we decompose the original non-convex and intractable optimization problem into three simplified sub-optimization problems, which are iteratively solved using an alternating optimization strategy. Simulations provide comparisons with state-of-the-art schemes, highlighting the superior efficiency, robustness, and scalability of the proposed joint multi-BF optimization scheme based on RSMA and green interference in improving system performances.