A Tutorial on Movable Antenna-Enabled ISAC Systems: Fundamentals, Parameter Estimation, and Security Issues

Abstract

Movable antenna (MA) technology has recently emerged as a promising paradigm for enhancing the flexibility and performance of wireless systems by allowing antennas to dynamically adjust their spatial positions within a confined region. Meanwhile, integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) has attracted significant attention as a key technology for next-generation wireless networks, aiming to integrate communication and sensing within a shared hardware and spectral framework. By leveraging the additional spatial degrees of freedom offered by MA, MA-enabled ISAC systems provide new opportunities to enhance both communication performance and sensing accuracy. However, the integration of MA into ISAC also poses new challenges in parameter estimation and security. In this tutorial, we provide a comprehensive overview of MA-enabled ISAC systems, with a particular focus on their fundamentals, parameter estimation, and security issues. First, we introduce the basic principles of MA and ISAC, and review representative MA-enabled ISAC systems and their potential applications. Then, we establish unified mathematical models for communication and sensing, and systematically review representative channel and sensing parameter estimation methods tailored to MA-enabled ISAC systems. Numerical comparisons are provided to illustrate the characteristics and performance of different estimation methods. Furthermore, we investigate the security issues of MA-enabled ISAC systems, introduce the fundamentals of physical-layer security (PLS), and summarize how the spatial reconfigurability of MAs can be exploited to enhance the security of ISAC systems. Representative case studies are presented to demonstrate the performance gains of MA-enabled secure ISAC systems. Finally, we identify several open issues and future research directions toward practical MA-enabled ISAC systems.