On the Interplay Between Sensing and Communications for UAV Trajectory Design

The unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are envisioned as promising aerial facilities for providing advanced communication services as well as sensing functionalities in the next-generation wireless system. This article considers a UAV-enabled integrated sensing and communications (ISACs) system, where a moving ground user (GU) is simultaneously tracked by multiple UAVs and receives the downlink communication information transmitted from the UAV. In particular, to jointly enhance the sensing and communication (S&C) performance, optimizing the UAV moving trajectory is demanded. To achieve this goal, we first harness the extended Kalman filtering (EKF) method for predicting and tracking the motion parameters of GU at each time slot, which relies on the range measurements extracted from the sensing echoes at the base station (BS). Afterward, we formulate a weighted optimization problem that addresses the design of UAV trajectories and GU-UAV association simultaneously, incorporating the consideration of real-time downlink communication rates and the Cramér–Rao bound (CRB) for GU tracking. The problem further is constrained by the maximum consumed power, maximum traveling distance, and minimum collision avoidance distance. As a step forward, to address the resultant nonconvex problem, we develop an efficient iterative algorithm to obtain a near-optimal solution by utilizing the successive convex approximate (SCA) technique. Specifically, we alternately solve the GU-UAV association and the real-time trajectory design problem at each time slot. Finally, our numerical simulations illustrate that our proposed algorithm can track the GU accurately while meeting the sensing-centric and/or communication-centric requirements.