Tracking-Assisted Robust Secure Transmission Against a Mobile Eavesdropper in Cell-Free ISAC Networks

Abstract

In this paper, we propose a tracking-assisted robust secure transmission framework for cell-free integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) networks that exploits distributed multistatic sensing to recursively track a mobile eavesdropper and quantify the associated position uncertainty. Since robust beamforming requires communication channel uncertainty rather than position uncertainty, directly incorporating tracking information into secure transmission is nontrivial. This challenge becomes more pronounced in cell-free ISAC, where the common position uncertainty propagates differently to the channels of geographically distributed access points (APs), resulting in coupled AP-specific channel uncertainties. To address this challenge, we fuse multistatic sensing measurements from distributed APs and sensing receivers using an extended Kalman filter (EKF) and propose a Jacobian-based anisotropic ellipsoidal uncertainty model that maps the EKF position-error covariance to coupled AP-specific channel uncertainties. Based on the proposed model, we formulate a robust sum secrecy-rate maximization problem under per-AP transmit-power and sensing mean-square error constraints and develop an efficient alternating optimization algorithm for the joint design of communication beamforming and sensing signals. Simulation results demonstrate a fundamental trade-off between tracking accuracy and secrecy performance, the benefits of distributed multistatic sensing and cooperative transmission in cell-free ISAC, and the effectiveness of the proposed robust design in improving secrecy reliability under mobility-induced channel uncertainty.