Cooperative Sensing and Communication Beamforming Design for Low-Altitude Economy

Abstract: To empower the low-altitude economy with high-accuracy sensing and high-rate communication, this paper proposes a cooperative integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) framework for aerial-ground networks. In the proposed system, the ground base stations (BSs) cooperatively serve the unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), which are equipped for either joint communication and sensing or sensing-only operations. The BSs employ coordinated beamforming to simultaneously transmit communication and sensing signals, while the UAVs execute their missions. To maximize the weighted sum rate under the sensing signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR) constraints, we jointly optimize the transmit beamforming, receive filtering, and UAV trajectory. The resulting non-convex problem is solved using an alternating optimization framework incorporating semidefinite relaxation (SDR) and successive convex approximation (SCA). Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed joint design achieves higher communication throughput while ensuring required sensing robustness. Additionally, the sensing SINR threshold and the UAV altitude have a significant impact on the trajectory design, highlighting the necessity of adaptive deployment strategies in practical applications.