Performance Limits for Drone Applications with Integrated Communication and Sensing in 6G Networks

A future design goal for 6G networks is the pos-sibility to use the transmitted OFDM signal also for sensing applications beyond the communication purpose. The transmitter, which probably provide the highest power, are base stations, but in case of uplink or sidelink transmissions the radiation of user equipment can also be used. This leads to bistatic radar configurations with moving transmitter and receivers, where the underlying use case is the installation of user equipment on drones for target detection. The achievable accuracy is derived in this paper for multi-static measurements and tracks. The position of non-cooperative transmitters can also be determined with passive emitter tracking (PET) receivers. Both type of measurements can be fused by Kalman filtering. Besides target detection the operation as bistatic synthetic aperture radar is a interesting use case in order to generate images of the ground. This requires an assessment on the constraints for valid transmitter and receiver configurations.