Performance Analysis of Sensing-Assisted Communications in Aerial-to-Ground Networks

Joint communication and sensing (JCAS) technology allows the coexistence of sensing and communication capabilities within the same frequency band without causing mutual interference. Aerial-to-ground wireless communication networks offer additional flexibility for communication users and sensing targets through the dynamic positioning of uncrewed aerial vehicles (UAVs), resulting in an extra degree of freedom to alleviate the challenges imposed by the dynamic characteristics of the wireless propagation channel. In this paper, the performance of a sensing-assisted aerial communication network is analytically investigated in scenarios with realistic assumptions for the channel and system model. Indeed, the presented analysis considers independent but non-identically distributed shadowing effects, non-isotropic antennas, and a generic statistical distribution for the radar cross section of sensing targets. Analytical expressions are derived for the statistics of the received signal-to-interference plus noise ratio (SINR), for both sensing and communication functionalities, while simpler expressions for special cases and asymptotic results are also obtained. Based on the analytical derivations, communication and sensing performance have been evaluated using, respectively, the outage and coverage probabilities and the ergodic radar estimation rate and detection probability. Numerical and simulation results demonstrate the accuracy of the proposed analysis and reveal how factors like non-identical distributed statistics of shadowing, small scale fading, and interference influence the performance of the system.