Formation Design and Control for ISAC-Oriented Low-Altitude Wireless Networks

Abstract

Low-altitude wireless networks (LAWNs) are increasingly expected to support missions that require both reliable connectivity and environmental sensing. This paper studies a multi-drone integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) scenario, where a drone swarm provides downlink transmission to ground users (GUs) while cooperatively localizing a sensing target (ST). We first determine the desired formation by balancing the communication rate and the Cramér-Rao bound (CRB)-based sensing accuracy, under user association, inter-drone separation, and feasible-region constraints. The resulting non-convex problem is addressed through an alternating optimization procedure. After obtaining the task-oriented formation, we develop a distributed control policy that guides drones from arbitrary initial locations to the optimized geometry while considering velocity coordination and obstacle avoidance. Simulation results show that the proposed design provides a tunable communication-sensing tradeoff and enables reliable formation convergence in obstacle-constrained environments.