Joint Trajectory and Beamforming Design for UAV-Enabled Integrated Sensing and Communication
Zhonghao Lyu, Guangxu Zhu, Jie Xu
Abstract
This paper studies the unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)-enabled integrated sensing and communication (ISAC), in which UAVs are dispatched as aerial dual-functional access points (APs) that can exploit the UAV maneuver control and strong line- of-sight (LoS) aerial-to-ground (A2G) links for efficient ISAC. Particularly, we consider a scenario with one UAV-AP equipped with a vertically placed uniform linear array (ULA), which sends combined information and sensing signals to communicate with multiple users and at the same time sense potential targets on the ground. Our objective is to jointly design the UAV trajectory and transmit beamforming to maximize the average weighted sum-rate throughput of communication users over the whole period, subject to the sensing beampattern gain requirements and transmit power constraints over different time slots, as well as practical flight constraints. While the above problem is challenging to solve, we propose an efficient algorithm by adopting the alternating optimization together with the successive convex approximation (SCA) and semidefinite relaxation (SDR). Numerical results are provided to validate the superiority of our proposed designs as compared to various benchmark schemes with heuristic trajectory designs.