Joint Customer Assignment, Power Allocation, and Subchannel Allocation in a UAV-Based Joint Radar and Communication Network

With the increasing of commercial communication applications, the scarcity of spectrum resources is becoming obvious, and the joint radar and communication (JRC) systems have been attracted much attention. The resource allocation technique is crucial for mitigating mutual interference and enhancing radar sensing and communication performance in JRC systems. A strategy for joint target and user assignment, power allocation, and subchannel allocation (JCAPASA) in an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)-based radar and communication coexistence (RCC) network is proposed. The predicted conditional Cramér-Rao lower bound (PC-CRLB) incorporating uncertainty of sensor location (USL) is derived and utilized as the optimization metric. The optimization model aims to minimize the sum of weighted PC-CRLBs for multiple targets while adhering to constraints such as communication data ratio (CDR) requirements, beam assignment, power budget, and subchannel non-overlap. The optimization model is nonconvex and falls into the NP-hard class. An iterative descent-based optimization method (IDBOM) is proposed for its solution. The simulation results confirm the efficiency and effectiveness of the proposed strategy compared to state-of-the-art methods. The results also imply that the proposed strategy comprehensively considers spatial diversity and power budget to maximize tracking performance while meeting the CDR requirements.