Rotatable Antenna Meets UAV: Towards Dual-Level Channel Reconfiguration Paradigm for ISAC

2025-10-17

AI Summary

In UAV-enabled integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) systems, achieving a favorable trade-off between sensing and communication (S/C) performance remains challenging. Method: This paper proposes a two-tier channel reconstruction framework leveraging rotatable antennas. It pioneers the use of antenna rotation to actively regulate large-scale path loss and channel correlation, introduces the subspace correlation coefficient to quantify S/C coupling, and jointly optimizes antenna orientation, beamforming, and UAV trajectory—proving theoretically that the optimal trajectory follows a “hover–fly–hover” structure. Efficient co-design is achieved via closed-form solutions and hierarchical frequency-hopping (HFH) structural analysis. Contribution/Results: Experiments demonstrate that the proposed method significantly expands the achievable S/C trade-off region, outperforming baseline schemes in both static-deployment and fully-mobile scenarios, while simultaneously enhancing communication rate and sensing accuracy.

Technology Category

• Planning, Routing, and Scheduling: Optimization of Spatio-temporal Systems
• Search and Optimization: Mixed Discrete/Continuous Search
• Intelligent Robots: Learning & Optimization for ROB

Application Category

• Systems and Infrastructure for Web, Mobile and WoT: Energy management for devices in mobile Web and WoT environments
• Security and Privacy: Large-scale security measurements
• Search and Retrieval-Augmented AI: Efficiency and scalability of Web search engines

Abstract

Integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) is viewed as a key enabler for future wireless networks by sharing the hardware and wireless resources between the functionalities of sensing and communication (S&C). Due to the shared wireless resources for both S&C, it is challenging to achieve a critical trade-off between these two integrated functionalities. To address this issue, this paper proposes a novel dual-level channel reconfiguration framework for ISAC by deploying rotatable antennas at an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV), where both the large-scale path loss and the correlation of S&C channels can be proactively controlled, thereby allowing a flexible trade-off between S&C performance. To characterize the S&C tradeoff, we aim to maximize the communication rate by jointly optimizing the RA rotation, the transmit beamforming, and the UAV trajectory, subject to the given requirement of sensing performance. For the typical scenario of static UAV deployment, we introduce the concept of subspace correlation coefficient to derive closed-form solutions for the optimal RA rotation, transmit beamforming, and UAV hovering location. For the scenario of a fully mobile UAV, we prove that the optimal trajectory of a UAV follows a hover-fly-hover (HFH) structure, thereby obtaining its global optimal solution. Simulation results show that the proposed design significantly improves the achievable S&C trade-off region compared to benchmark schemes.

Problem

• Optimizing dual-level channel reconfiguration for integrated sensing and communication
• Achieving flexible trade-off between sensing and communication performance
• Jointly optimizing antenna rotation, beamforming and UAV trajectory

Innovation

• Rotatable antennas enable dual-level channel reconfiguration
• Joint optimization of rotation, beamforming, and UAV trajectory
• Closed-form solutions for static and mobile UAV scenarios