Movable-Antenna Array Empowered ISAC Systems for Low-Altitude Economy

TL;DR

This paper proposes a movable-antenna array system for UAV-enabled low-altitude platforms, enhancing data transmission and sensing capabilities for low-altitude economy applications through joint beamforming and antenna positioning optimization.

Contribution

It introduces a novel movable-antenna array design and an optimization algorithm for joint beamforming and antenna placement in UAV-based ISAC systems.

Findings

Achieves higher data rates compared to benchmark schemes.

Improves beamforming gain and sensing performance.

Demonstrates the effectiveness of the proposed optimization approach.

Abstract

This paper investigates a movable-antenna (MA) array empowered integrated sensing and communications (ISAC) over low-altitude platform (LAP) system to support low-altitude economy (LAE) applications. In the considered system, an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) is dispatched to hover in the air, working as the UAV-enabled LAP (ULAP) to provide information transmission and sensing simultaneously for LAE applications. To improve the throughput capacity and meet the requirement of the sensing beampattern threshold, we formulate a data rate maximization problem by jointly optimizing the transmit information and sensing beamforming, and the antenna positions of the MA array. Since the data rate maximization problem is non-convex with highly coupled variables, we propose an efficient alternation optimization based algorithm, which iteratively optimizes parts of the variables while fixing the others. Numerical results show the superiority of the proposed MA array-based scheme in terms of the achievable data rate and beamforming gain compared with two benchmark schemes.