Joint Power, Bandwidth, and Subchannel Allocation in a UAV-Assisted DFRC Network

Uncrewed aerial vehicle (UAV)-assisted joint radar and communication (JRC) systems are widely adopted in Internet of Things applications. This is due to their convenience, affordability, and space and resource-saving. A joint power, bandwidth, and subchannel allocation (JPBSA) strategy is proposed for a UAV-assisted dual-function radar and communication (DFRC) network. The predicted posterior Cramér-Rao lower bound (PCRLB) is utilized to measure the target tracking accuracy. The optimization model is established as minimizing the sum of weighted predicted PCRLBs while meeting the communication data ratio (CDR) requirements, total power and bandwidth budget. It is shown that the JPBSA problem involves a mixed-integer programming (MIP) problem. Even worse, the bandwidth and subchannel are coherent. A three-stage alternating optimization method (TSAOM) is constructed for the solution. By integrating the radar and communication power allocation as a whole, the alternating ascent-descent method (AADM) is employed to solve the power allocation. Then, two propositions are proposed to provide the upper bounds for bandwidth allocation. Finally, the subchannel allocation is solved using a greedy search-based method. Simulation results confirm the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed method, compared with the state-of-the-art methods. It also shows that using the PCRLB as the optimization metric is better than the signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR) and mutual information (MI).