Abstract
As the use of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) is greatly increasing, there is an emerging threat of using UAVs in infrastructure/cyber-attacks and data-eavesdropping. From the safety and security perspective, it is a timely need to build an air surveillance system that enables a seamless detection function for low-and-middle altitude flying targets. However, it is unrealistic to widely deploy classical radar stations due to the astronomical cost. Rethinking the role of cellular mobile communication networks, we desire to add a “vision-like” capability to the widely deployed outdoor cellular base stations (BSs) to realize joint imaging and communication (JIAC) simultaneously through sharing the existing cellular communication infrastructure and spectrum. In this work, it is for the first time to systematically study and demonstrate the concept of cellular base station imaging for UAV detection, which allows a cellular BS to work like an inverse synthetic-aperture radar (ISAR) besides communication. Firstly, we provide the JIAC transmission signalling and systematic operation mechanism. Secondly, the feasibility of JIAC is investigated and analysed to support the idea of cellular base station imaging. Finally, numerical simulation evaluates the imaging performance of three typical types of cellular BSs operating at 900 MHz, 3.5 GHz and 28 GHz, respectively, which implies that cellular BS imaging works for UAV detection! Furthermore, the radar imaging function, as a new by-product, requires only a very little change to the current orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) communication signalling and has nearly no influence on the current communication operation and performance.
Highlights
T HE development of low-and-middle altitude unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) has attracted greatly increasing attention from both academia and industry, due to its benefits in flexible mobility, low cost and easy operation compared to conventional ground carriers and manned aircrafts
It is for the first time to systematically study and demonstrate the concept of cellular base station imaging that allows an outdoor cellular base station to work like an inverse synthetic-aperture radar (ISAR) to ”see” flying targets, but at nearly no extra cost of the current cellular mobile communication function and performance
The feasibility study provides a theoretical view and analysis of this joint imaging and communication (JIAC) idea. Note that this JIAC method requires a very little change of the current orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) transmission in cellular mobile networks, and has almost no influence on the current communication operation and performance. This cellular base station imaging has a great potential for the practical application
Summary
T HE development of low-and-middle altitude unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) has attracted greatly increasing attention from both academia and industry, due to its benefits in flexible mobility, low cost and easy operation compared to conventional ground carriers and manned aircrafts. It is for the first time to systematically study and demonstrate the concept of cellular base station imaging that allows an outdoor cellular base station to work like an ISAR to ”see” flying targets, but at nearly no extra cost of the current cellular mobile communication function and performance. CONCEPT, SIGNALLING STRATEGY AND IMAGING TECHNOLOGY Consider a typical cellular base station equipped with multiple antennas that operates at spectrum band (fc, B) in the downlink, where fc and B denote the carrier frequency and the spectrum bandwidth both in Hertz (Hz). The illustration focus is given on flying targets, e.g., UAVs. As illustrated in Fig., a cellular base station, usually deploy on the top of a tower or roof of the tall building, has an additional aerial radar sensing area targeting the flying objectives, besides the conventional mobile communication service mainly supporting ground mobile users. The detailed radar signalling strategy will be described in the following part
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