Physical Layer Security for Sensing-Communication-Computing-Control Closed Loop: A Systematic Security Perspective

In industrial automation or emergency rescue, sensors and robots work together with the help of an edge information hub (EIH) containing both communication and computing modules. Typically, the EIH collects the sensing data via the sensor-to-EIH link, processes data and then makes decisions on board before sending commands to the robot via the EIH-to-robot link. This forms a sensing-communication-computing-control (SC3) closed loop. In practice, the inherent openness of wireless links within the closed loop leads to susceptibility to eavesdropping. To this end, this paper refines the conventional physical layer security (PLS) approach with a systematic thinking to safeguard the SC3closed loop. The closed-loop negentropy (CNE), a new metric for the performance of the whole SC3closed loop, is maximized under the closed-loop security constraint. The transmit time, power, bandwidth of both wireless links, and the computing capability, are jointly designed. The optimization problem is non-convex. We leverage the Karush-Kuhn-Tucker (KKT) conditions and the monotonic optimization (MO) theory to derive its globally optimal solution. Simulation results show the performance gain of the proposed systematic approach, and reveal the advantage of exploiting the closed-loop structure-level PLS over the link-level or sum-link-level designs.