Waveform Design for Target Identity Recognition (TIR) Enabled ISAC Systems

Integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) systems improve unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) efficiency and safety for low-altitude economy, but struggle with target identification due to reliance on primary radar. Thus, inspired by secondary surveillance radar (SSR) systems that can recognize target identities, this paper proposes an target identity recognition (TIR)-enabled ISAC technology to further improve UAV identification and tracking capabilities, optimizing airspace management and collision avoidance. Firstly, a novel integrated waveform design for TIR-enabled ISAC systems is proposed, where the waveform carries the interrogation/reply information of TIR through pulse modulation, and maintains a low-level amplitude (LLA) during pulse interval, allowing communication data to be modulated onto the carrier phase. Then, the proposed integrated waveform shows a trade-off between TIR bit error rate (BER) and communication symbol error rate (SER) due to the LLA, with an algorithm developed to optimize LLA for minimizing TIR BER while maintaining low communication SER.