IEEE 802.11ad-Aided 5-D Sensing with a UAV Swarm in Urban Environment

Aerial base stations mounted on unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) support next-generation wireless networks in challenging environments such as urban areas, disaster zones, and remote locations. Further, UAV swarms overcome the challenges of limited battery life and other operational constraints of a single UAV. However, tracking mobile users on the ground by each UAV and the corresponding synchronization between the UAVs is a significant issue that must be addressed before this framework can be deployed in reality. Incorporating additional sensing capabilities to facilitate this additional requirement would introduce significant overhead in terms of hardware, cost, and power to each UAV. Instead, we propose an integrated sensing and communications-enabled swarm UAV system, based on the millimeter-wave IEEE 802.11ad protocol. Further, we show that our proposed system is capable of five-dimensional (5-D) ground target sensing (range, Doppler velocity, azimuth, elevation, and polarization) in an urban environment. Numerical experiments using realistic models demonstrate and validate the performance of 5-D sensing using our proposed 802-11ad-aided UAV system.