2026· IEEE Open Journal of the Communications Society· Vol 7, pp. 9145-9182· 1 citation· 185 references
TL;DR
This survey provides a systematic review across six interconnected domains—channel estimation (CE) and beam tracking, throughput maximization, weighted sum rate (WSR) and sensing co-optimization, delay and age of information (AoI) minimization, energy efficiency (EE), and PLS—each supported by a structured comparative table covering over 80 methodologies.
Abstract
Uncrewed aerial vehicles (UAVs) integrated with integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) technology have emerged as a compelling platform for sixth-generation (6G) wireless networks, leveraging three-dimensional mobility to perform simultaneous sensing and communication (S&C) across applications ranging from disaster response to airspace monitoring. While the field has advanced rapidly, existing surveys have not sufficiently characterized UAV-specific design challenges nor the cross-cutting trade-offs governing practical deployment. To bridge this gap, this survey provides a systematic review across six interconnected domains—channel estimation (CE) and beam tracking, throughput maximization, weighted sum rate (WSR) and sensing co-optimization, delay and age of information (AoI) minimization, energy efficiency (EE), and PLS—each supported by a structured comparative table covering over 80 methodologies. The survey concludes with a research roadmap addressing propagation modeling, platform dynamics, imperfect channel state information (CSI) robustness, energy-AoI-security co-design, and standardization, providing a structured foundation for future 6G UAV-ISAC research.
Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have emerged as promising aerial platforms for next-generation wireless networks, offering three-dimensional mobility, rapid deployment, and high line-of-sight (LoS) link probability. This paper presents a structured overview of UAV-assisted wireless communications, covering key network architectures, air-to-ground channel characteristics, mobility-aware deployment and trajectory design, resource management, and multi-UAV cooperation. We further review recent integrations of UAVs with emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI)-driven optimization, reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS), integrated sensing and communication (ISAC), multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO), and semantic communication. Integration scenarios and recent research trends in beyond-5G and 6G networks are discussed, and open challenges along with future research directions are identified. This survey aims to provide a concise yet comprehensive reference for researchers and engineers working on UAV-assisted wireless network design.
Jueun Jeong, Sehyeon Kwon, Changhui Kim et al.· International Conference on...· 0 citations
The rapid proliferation of Uncrewed Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) introduces significant challenges to low-altitude airspace security, particularly from unauthorized intrusions. To address these vulnerabilities, Integrated Sensing and Communication (ISAC) has emerged as a key enabler for anti-UAV systems. However, existing studies focusing on cellular networks with fixed base stations are ill-suited for the continuous movement of target UAVs, thus failing to meet the dual demands of flexible sensing and reliable positioning. To address this, we propose an ISAC-enabled anti-UAV scheme solely based on cooperative UAVs. Specifically, we first derive the optimal transmit power under the constraint of space-air transmission outage probability tolerance. Subsequently, we deduce the sensing Fisher information matrix and Cramér-Rao Bound (CRB) by incorporating the position uncertainty of the target UAV. Then, we formulate a long-term CRB minimization problem to enhance cooperative sensing performance. To tackle this NP-hard problem, we design a robust optimization algorithm that jointly optimizes transmit-receive beamforming, association scheduling, and UAV trajectory, by transforming the structurally complex CRB matrix into a set of semi-definite constraints, and resolving the inherent position uncertainty. Numerical results demonstrate that our proposed algorithm outperforms representative algorithms in terms of sensing accuracy and robustness.
Xiaojie Wang, Lingfei Li, Zhaolong Ning et al.· IEEE Transactions on Wireles...· 1 citation
A pinching-antenna system (PASS)-enabled multi-UAV integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) framework is proposed for adaptive downlink communications and UAV sensing. By jointly optimizing the pinching antenna (PA) activation, waveguide-level baseband precoding, and PA-level radiation power, the weighted sum of communication rates and sensing information rates is maximized, subject to the minimum-rate requirements of communication users (CUs) and sensing targets (STs). To address the resulting mixed-integer, high-dimensional, and strongly coupled non-convex problem, a genetic algorithm (GA)-based two-layer optimization (TLO) framework is developed. The PA activation is inferred by a GA-trained MLP policy in the outer layer, while the waveguide-level baseband precoding and PA-level radiation power are alternately optimized using weighted minimum mean-square error (WMMSE) and successive convex approximation (SCA) in the inner layer. Numerical results demonstrate that the proposed GA-TLO significantly improves both weighted sum rate and constraint satisfaction compared with conventional multiple-antenna architectures. Moreover, it achieves up to a 35% higher weighted sum rate than the fixed-activation PASS benchmark with BCD-based continuous optimization, while also substantially outperforming the fully uniform PASS and MIMO baselines.
Yanglin Hu, Tiankui Zhang, Xiaoxia Xu et al.· IEEE Transactions on Wireles...· 0 citations
Driven by the vision of a thriving low-altitude economy and aiming to provide on-demand services for diverse entities, this paper investigates an integrated sensing and communication (ISAC)-enabled low-altitude wireless network (LAWN). Benefiting from flexible mobility and cost-effective cooperative deployment, multiple ISAC-enabled uncrewed aerial vehicles (UAVs) are emerging as an ISAC paradigm for on-demand deployment in LAWN. However, due to the complex inter-UAV interference and resource coupling in LAWN, it is difficult to properly coordinate different constrained resources, including spatial deployment, energy, and wireless channels, to simultaneously meet the sensing and communication requirements. To address these challenges, this paper formulates a sensing–communication optimization (SCO) problem in LAWN by jointly optimizing subcarrier allocation, transmit power allocation, and three-dimensional (3D) UAV deployments to maximize network utility while satisfying quality of service (QoS) requirements for multiple users and target sensing mutual information (MI) requirements. To enable efficient solutions, we propose a hierarchical optimization approach that vertically decouples the SCO problem into two subproblems: a top level employing a Gibbs Sampling–based multi-UAV 3D deployment algorithm for efficient exploration and deployment optimization, and a bottom level performing resource allocation via a dual-based joint power and subcarrier allocation algorithm. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed approach achieves a favorable trade-off between communication and sensing and significantly enhances the overall performance and adaptability of the LAWN.
Cheng Ma, Zewei Jing, Qinghai Yang et al.· IEEE Transactions on Wireles...· 0 citations
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.
An unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)-enabled ISAC system employing rate-splitting multiple access (RSMA) and a joint beamforming and trajectory optimization framework is investigated and results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm significantly improves the achievable system downlink rate.
Shunxuan Wang, Qi Zhu· Italian National Conference...· 0 citations
