Integrated Sensing, Communication, and Over-The-Air Control of UAV Swarm Dynamics

TL;DR

This work tackles spectrum scarcity in UAV swarm control by introducing ISAC-OTA, an integrated sensing and over-the-air control framework that uses a base station to construct and dispatch control signals while simultaneously sensing objects in the same time-frequency block. It develops two uplink BS post-processing matrices (control-centric for closed-form control and sensing-centric to mitigate interference) and a downlink ISAC optimization solved via a SCA-based algorithm to balance transmission accuracy with sensing SNR. The results show that ISAC-OTA achieves control performance comparable to a benchmark LQR method using a single shared bandwidth, while maintaining high sensing accuracy even with OTA interference, and eliminates the need for per-UAV bandwidth allocation. These findings demonstrate a spectrum-efficient approach for cooperative UAV swarms in future wireless systems, with strong potential for ISAC-enabled edge networks.

Abstract

Coordinated controlling a large UAV swarm requires significant spectrum resources due to the need for bandwidth allocation per UAV, posing a challenge in resource-limited environments. Over-the-air (OTA) control has emerged as a spectrum-efficient approach, leveraging electromagnetic superposition to form control signals at a base station (BS). However, existing OTA controllers lack sufficient optimization variables to meet UAV swarm control objectives and fail to integrate control with other BS functions like sensing. This work proposes an integrated sensing and OTA control framework (ISAC-OTA) for UAV swarm. The BS performs OTA signal construction (uplink) and dispatch (downlink) while simultaneously sensing objects. Two uplink post-processing methods are developed: a control-centric approach generating closed-form control signals via a feedback-looped OTA control problem, and a sensing-centric method mitigating transmission-induced interference for accurate object sensing. For the downlink, a non-convex problem is formulated and solved to minimize control signal dispatch (transmission) error while maintaining a minimum sensing signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). Simulation results show that the proposed ISAC-OTA controller achieves control performance comparable to the benchmark optimal control algorithm while maintaining high sensing accuracy, despite OTA transmission interference. Moreover, it eliminates the need for per-UAV bandwidth allocation, showcasing a spectrum-efficient method for cooperative control in future wireless systems.

Figures (8)

• Figure 1: Schematic flow of ISAC-OTA controller.
• Figure 2: Control performance comparison among the proposed ISAC-OTA controller, the existing Tx-power-OTA controller 9641840, and the original LQR as the benchmark.
• Figure 3: Mean absolute state controlling error of proposed ISAC-OTA controller, with respect to different numbers of BS antennas.
• Figure 4: Mean absolute state controlling error of proposed ISAC-OTA controller, with respect to different levels of minimum BS sensing SNR $\gamma_\text{SNR}$.
• Figure 5: Mean absolute sensing error of proposed ISAC-OTA controller in the uplink process, with respect to the number of BS antennas.