Joint Beamforming and Trajectory Design for Multi-Antenna UAV-Enabled ISAC

Driven by the limited spectrum resources, uncrewed aerial vehicles (UAVs)-enabled integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) have emerged as key platforms for executing complex tasks in various scenarios. In this paper, we propose a multi-antenna UAV-enabled ISAC system, where the UAV detects potential targets using transmitted radar signals and forwards the target information to the ground base station (GBS) via transmitted communication signals. Specifically, we employ radar receiving beam pattern gain as the sensing performance metric for target detection. A joint non-convex optimization problem for target sensing scheduling, sensing and communication beamforming and UAV trajectory is proposed to maximize the average beam pattern gain acquired by the radar receiver, while maintaining a certain communication performance. Then we propose an alternating direction optimization (ADO) algorithm to iteratively solve this problem. Simulation results confirm the feasibility of our sensing performance metric and demonstrate the superiority of the proposed algorithm over other schemes.