UAV-Assisted Multi-Target Resolvability in Joint Sensing and Communication System

The highly evolving integrated terrestrial and non-terrestrial networks can perform joint sensing and communication (JSAC) for various applications. For instance, in the case of vehicular networks, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and roadside units (RSUs) can cooperatively perform multi-target sensing and communication. Nevertheless, JSAC requires high efficiency in high mobility scenarios, where constantly sensing and detecting a moving vehicle is challenging because of the frequent Doppler shifts and channel variations. Besides, the target resolvability issue becomes more complex in high mobility. Therefore, we propose integrating UAVs into JSAC for multi-target resolvability issues because of their better line-of-sight (LOS) link and wide range of coverage areas. Moreover, we propose a novel framework in which an RSU simultaneously transmits a frequency-modulated continuous wave (FMCW) signal to mobile vehicles and UAV, where the UAV acts as an amplify-and-forward (AF) relay while cooperatively performing sensing by re-transmitting the amplified FMCW signal. Our results demonstrate a significant increase in sensing performance in terms of the probability of detection at the cost of slightly lower bit-error-rate (BER) performance.