Physical Layer Security in Near-Field Communications: What Will Be Changed?

A near-field secure transmission framework is proposed. Employing the hybrid beamforming architecture, a base station (BS) transmits the confidential information to a legitimate user (U) against an eavesdropper (E) in the near field. A two-stage algorithm is proposed to maximize the near-field secrecy capacity. Based on the fully-digital beamformers obtained in the first stage, the optimal analog beamformers and baseband digital beamformers can be alternatingly derived in the closed-form expressions in the second stage. Numerical results demonstrate that in contrast to the far-field secure communication relying on the angular disparity, the near-filed secure communication mainly relies on the distance disparity between U and E.