ISAC From the Sky: UAV Trajectory Design for Joint Communication and Target Localization

Integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) is studied in the airborne domain, where Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) act as communication base stations and radars simultaneously. The UAV transmits signals to users while leveraging these signals to localize targets. This research focuses on jointly improving communication and sensing (C&S) performances by designing the UAV trajectory and allocating user’s bandwidth. Since UAV’s sustainability is determined by its onboard battery, energy supply is considered as a constraint in the trajectory design. Communication performance is evaluated by total transmitted data, while sensing performance is assessed through Cramér-Rao bound (CRB). A tradeoff objective is formulated with normalization. To achieve a flexible tradeoff between C&S, the trajectory design is formulated as a weighted sum optimization problem. To improve the formulation accuracy of trajectory design, a multi-stage trajectory design (MSTD) is proposed. While the resultant design problem is difficult to solve directly, an iterative algorithm is developed to obtain a local optimal solution of UAV trajectory. Finally, numerical results are presented to show UAV trajectories determined by the tradeoff between C&S and the energy supply. Benefits of ISAC-based UAV scenario are highlighted by comparing the single-functional UAV scenarios.