Artificial Noise Aided Physical Layer Security for Near-Field MIMO with Fluid Antenna Systems

With the evolution of wireless systems toward large-scale arrays and high-frequency reconfigurable architectures, fluid antenna systems (FAS) operating in the near-field (NF) regime provide new degrees of freedom (DoF) for physical layer security (PLS). This paper proposes an artificial-noise (AN)-aided PLS scheme for NF fluid-antenna multiple-input multiple-output (FA-MIMO) systems, with joint beamforming (BF) and AN design for both compact and large arrays. An alternating-optimization (AO) framework addresses the sparsity-constrained non-convex design by splitting it into a continuous BF/AN joint-design subproblem and a discrete FAS port-selection subproblem. Closed-form fully digital BF/AN solutions are obtained via a generalized spectral water-filling procedure within a block coordinate descent (BCD) surrogate and realized by a hardware-efficient hybrid beamforming (HBF) architecture that embeds AN in the baseband without extra radio-frequency (RF) chains. For FAS port selection, a row-energy based prune--refit rule, aligned with Karush--Kuhn--Tucker (KKT) conditions of a group-sparsity surrogate, enables efficient active-port determination. Simulation results confirm that the proposed design exploits the geometry and position-domain DoF of FAS and significantly improves secrecy performance, particularly for non-extremely-large arrays where NF beam focusing alone is inadequate.