Modeling, Analysis and Optimization of Low-Altitude Air Traffic Control in Joint Radar and Communication Networks

This paper investigates the low-altitude air traffic control in joint radar and communication (JRC) networks. Small base stations (SBSs) apply JRC technology to serve unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) by sensing UAVs and transmitting the sensing information to the macro base station (MBS), which assists for low-altitude air traffic control. We formulate this control problem as a service strategy optimization problem, where SBSs need to perform multiple sense and communication operations within each scheduling period. The goal is to maximize the network service profit, which is obtained from serving UAVs by SBSs. We prove that the objective function of the optimization problem is submodular and then propose a greedy-based service algorithm to solve it efficiently with low complexity. The proposed algorithm provably achieves at least $1 - \frac{1}{{\sqrt e }}$ of the optimum value. Simulation results show that our proposed algorithm performs close to the optimal solution with different system parameters.