UAV-Enabled Integrated Sensing, Computing, and Communication: A Fundamental Trade-Off

Abstract

We propose an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) enabled integrated sensing, computing, and communication (U-ISCC) framework, where a treble-functional UAV performs local computation and also delivers its computational tasks to ground access points. Meanwhile, this UAV is employed to sense a target by using the unified beam waves. Our goal is to characterize the Pareto boundary between the computation capacity and the sensing beampattern gain, by which the fundamental trade-off of them is unveiled. To solve the challenging problem, we propose a joint optimization algorithm by applying the semidefinite programming method and the concave-convex procedure technique, which ensures the rank-1 constraint with a low complexity. Numerical results finally verify that the proposed algorithm explicitly depicts the performance region, and demonstrate that the UAV boosts the ability of sensing, computing, and communication to strike a balance by fully exploring its functions.