UAV Swarming for Air-Ground ISAC via Cross-Region Cooperation

Abstract

To serve the volumetric air-ground space, uncrewed aerial vehicles (UAVs) are urgently needed. Yet, relying on them for integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) introduces two key challenges: 1) dynamic and imbalanced ground communication demand, and 2) limited observation diversity for sensing. To address these issues, a cross-region cooperative framework is designed to coordinate UAV swarms. Specifically, a service-driven regional partitioning scheme is proposed to support traffic-aware UAV communication, and an adaptive handshaking mechanism is introduced to improve cooperative sensing accuracy by mitigating residual inter-region phase errors with controlled synchronization overhead. Based on these designs, a region-level multi-agent proximal policy optimization (MAPPO) framework with centralized training and decentralized execution (CTDE) is developed for cross-region cooperative decision-making. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed method achieves a communication quality-of-service (QoS) of approximately 90% and reduces the Cram\'er-Rao bound (CRB) by about 45% compared to conventional baselines.