Joint Sensing and Age of Information Optimization for Energy Constrained UAV-Assisted Integrated Sensing, Calculation, and Communication

Owing to the advantages of high mobility, low cost, and on-demand deployment, uncrewed aerial vehicles (UAVs) can serve as triple-function aerial service platforms, providing sensing, calculation, and communication services for ground users in remote areas or emergencies. In this paper, a UAV-assisted integrated sensing, calculation, and communication (ISCC) system is proposed, where the UAV detects and processes the status information of the sensing target, and then sends the calculation results to the data collection center. In order to evaluate the performance of ISCC system, the age of information (AoI) and the radar estimation rate are introduced to define the freshness and amount of sensing data, respectively. Taking into account the UAV energy limitations, the amount of sensing data is maximized while the AoI is minimized through jointly optimizing the sensing scheduling, sensing times, transmit power, operating frequency, and motion parameters of the UAV under the constraint of radar signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). The formulated mixed-integer nonlinear programming problem is decomposed into five subproblems, and the optimal solutions can be achieved by proposing an alternating optimization (AO)-based five-stages optimization algorithm to optimize these subproblems iteratively. Simulation results show that both the sensing performance and information freshness of the system can be effectively improved by optimizing the UAV parameters.