Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are poised for explosive growth in the low-altitude economy, causing spectrum congestion and posing a challenge to airspace regulation. Although integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) enables simultaneous communication and sensing, alleviating the spectrum shortage, the capability of one single base station (BS) is generally limited. Therefore, a multi-BS cooperative ISAC system is developed to perceive the status of UAVs at the cell edge. Multiple BSs share the same time-frequency resources and adopt a time-division scheme to avoid mutual interference between communication and sensing functionalities. Specifically, the frame structure of the communication system is modified to accommodate the sensing functionality. A robust interference nulling based beam pattern is first proposed to prevent the line-of-sight (LoS) interference between BSs from overrunning the dynamic range of the analog-to-digital converter (ADC). Moreover, we designed a space-time block codec-based orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) to separate echo signals originating from different BSs, which transforms the inter-BS reflected interference into bistatic sensing signals. Furthermore, a data-level fusion method based on the signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR) of the range profile is applied to improve the positioning accuracy. The numerical results reveal that the proposed beam pattern greatly avoids LoS interference. The echo signals originating from neighboring BSs can assist in target detection and angle of arrival (AoA) estimation. Compared to soft fusion and single-BS schemes, the proposed fusion method enhances positioning precision by an order of magnitude, and is practically feasible even in the presence of clock synchronization errors.

Emerging applications, such as autonomous driving and Internet of Things (IoT) services put forward the demand for simultaneous sensing and communication functions in the same system. Integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) has the potential to meet the demands of ubiquitous communication and high-precision sensing due to the advantages of spectrum and hardware resource sharing, as well as the mutual enhancement of sensing and communication. However, the ISAC system faces severe interference requiring effective interference suppression, avoidance, and exploitation techniques. This article provides a comprehensive survey on the interference management techniques in ISAC systems, involving network architecture, system design, signal processing, and resource allocation. We first review the channel modeling and performance metrics of the ISAC system. Then, the methods for managing self-interference (SI), mutual interference (MI), and clutter in a single base station (BS) system are summarized, including interference suppression, interference avoidance, and interference exploitation methods. Furthermore, cooperative interference management methods are studied to address the cross-link interference (CLI) in a coordinated multipoint ISAC (CoMP-ISAC) system. Finally, future trends are revealed. This article may provide a reference for the study of interference management in ISAC systems.

Integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) is expected to play a crucial role in the sixth-generation (6G) mobile communication systems, offering potential applications in the scenarios of intelligent transportation, smart factories, etc. The performance of radar sensing in ISAC systems is closely related to the characteristics of radar sensing and communication channels. Therefore, ISAC channel modeling serves as a fundamental cornerstone for evaluating and optimizing ISAC systems. This article provides a comprehensive survey on the ISAC channel modeling methods. Furthermore, the methods of target radar cross section (RCS) modeling and clutter RCS modeling are summarized. Finally, we discuss the future research trends related to ISAC channel modeling in various scenarios.

Accurate future traffic flow prediction is essential for decision-making in travel recommendations and route planning, aiming to reduce congestion and enhance traffic safety. Traditional traffic flow prediction models often face limitations in quality and structure, leading to increased training costs and inefficiencies, due to data scarcity and centralized training modes that compromise data privacy. To address these issues, we propose a model called 2MGTCN, which combines Multi-modal Graph Convolutional Networks (GCN) and Temporal Convolutional Networks (TCN) for Cross-city Traffic Flow Prediction (TFP). Our 2MGTCN model utilizes federated transfer learning (FTL) to transfer the model from the source to the target domain, mitigating data scarcity. It also incorporates GCN and TCN to capture both spatial and temporal information, enhancing cross-city adaptability. Additionally, Grey Relation Analysis (GRA) and Dynamic Time Warping (DTW) methods are applied to capture road relationships, and a Federated Parameter Aggregation based on Spatial Similarity (FPASS) algorithm is proposed for ensuring effective parameter aggregation by considering spatial similarity. Simulation results show that our 2MGTCN algorithm outperforms traditional TFP models in both centralized and distributed training modes, ensuring higher accuracy and better privacy protection.

In the Integrated Sensing and Communication (ISAC) system, the pilot signal has high sensing performance due to its good autocorrelation and high transmit power. However, the equally spaced pilot signal reduces the maximum unambiguous range and velocity compared with the OFDM signal with continuous resources, limiting the sensing performance of base station (BS). Additionally, BS fails to estimate the distances and velocities of multiple targets in coherent signals. To address these problems, we propose a pilot design scheme with coprime and periodic stepping values for pilot indices. Theoretical analysis and simulation results demonstrate that the proposed pilot signal does not reduce the maximum unambiguous range and velocity, which can be processed by the smoothing algorithm and the multiple signal classification (MUSIC) algorithm to accurately estimate the distances and velocities of multiple targets in coherent signals.

Utilizing widely distributed communication nodes to achieve environmental reconstruction is one of the significant scenarios for integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) and a crucial technology for 6G. To achieve this crucial functionality, we propose a deep learning-based multinode ISAC 4D environment reconstruction method with the uplink-downlink (UL-DL) cooperation, which employs virtual aperture technology, constant false alarm rate (CFAR) detection, and mutiple signal classification (music) algorithm to maximize the sensing capabilities of single sensing nodes. Simultaneously, it introduces a cooperative environmental reconstruction scheme involving the multinode cooperation and UL-DL cooperation to overcome the limitations of single-node sensing caused by occlusion and limited viewpoints. Furthermore, the deep learning models attention gate gridding residual neural network (AGGRNN) and multiview sensing fusion network (MVSFNet) to enhance the density of the sparsely reconstructed point clouds are proposed, aiming to restore as many original environmental details as possible while preserving the spatial structure of the point cloud. Additionally, we propose a multilevel fusion strategy incorporating both the data-level and feature-level fusion to fully leverage the advantages of the multinode cooperation. Experimental results demonstrate that the environmental reconstruction performance of this method significantly outperforms the other comparative method, enabling high-precision environmental reconstruction using the ISAC system.

Integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) is regarded as the enabling technology in the future 5th-Generation-Advanced (5G-A) and 6th-Generation (6G) mobile communication system. ISAC waveform design is critical in ISAC system. However, the difference of the performance metrics between sensing and communication brings challenges for the ISAC waveform design. This paper applies the unified performance metrics in information theory, namely mutual information (MI), to measure the communication and sensing performance in multicarrier ISAC system. In multi-input multi-output orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (MIMO-OFDM) ISAC system, we first derive the sensing and communication MI with subcarrier correlation and spatial correlation. Then, we propose optimal waveform designs for maximizing the sensing MI, communication MI and the weighted sum of sensing and communication MI, respectively. The optimization results are validated by Monte Carlo simulations. Our work provides effective closed-form expressions for waveform design, enabling the realization of MIMO-OFDM ISAC system with balanced performance in communication and sensing.

To realize higher-level autonomous driving and advanced transportation applications, the introduction of the integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) technique in vehicular networks is indispensable. Different from the existing works, this paper investigates the power allocation problem for onboard ISAC systems of vehicles, during the vehicle-to-infrastructure communication, vehicle-to-vehicle communication and sensing progress, in case of the time-varying communication channel gains, the time-varying impulse responses of sensed targets, and the stochastic traffic. Note that both the inter-beam interference of a single vehicle and the inter-vehicle interference are important considerations. Specifically, we formulate a stochastic programming problem, which optimizes the sensing performance, subject to constraints on the network stability, power limits and quality-of-service requirements. Leveraging the Lyapunov optimization technique, this stochastic programming problem is transformed into a single-time slot non-convex problem. Taking advantages of genetic algorithm and particle swarm optimization (PSO), a hybrid meta-heuristic algorithm is designed to solve the non-convex problem. Typically, we improve the traditional PSO to balance the global search ability and local search ability of particles. Finally, a dynamic power allocation strategy is proposed. The theoretical analysis and simulation results show that this strategy achieves a communication performance-sensing performance tradeoff of [$ {\mathrm {O(}}1/V{\mathrm {)}} $,$ {\mathrm {O(}}V{\mathrm {)}} $] with$ V $being a control parameter.

This paper designs a low peak-to-average power ratio (PAPR) Integrated Sensing and Communication (ISAC) waveform based on OFDM. Firstly, we propose an ISAC waveform structure, in which radar subcarriers within the OFDM symbols are randomly located anywhere within non-contiguous Physical Resource Blocks (PRBs). Using this OFDM-based ISAC waveform structure, the sensing mutual information (MI) between the radar channel and the received waveform is derived and maximized under the constraints of communication data information rate (DIR), PAPR, and transmit power. Then, an optimization algorithm is proposed to obtain the optimal power allocation of subcarriers. Finally, simulation results verify the effectiveness and flexibility of our designed waveform.

Integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) will greatly enhance the efficiency of physical resource utilization. The design of ISAC signal based on the orthogonal frequency division multiplex (OFDM) signal is the mainstream. However, when detecting the long-range target, the delay of echo signal exceeds CP duration, which will result in inter-symbol interference (ISI) and inter-carrier interference (ICI), limiting the sensing range. Facing the above problem, we propose to increase useful signal power through coherent compensation and improve the signal to interference plus noise power ratio (SINR) of each OFDM block. Compared with the traditional 2D-FFT algorithm, the improvement of SINR of range-doppler map (RDM) is verified by simulation, which will expand the sensing range.

Achieving seamless global coverage is one of the ultimate goals of space-air-ground integrated network, as a part of which High Altitude Platform (HAP) network can provide wide-area coverage. However, deploying a large number of HAPs will lead to severe congestion of existing frequency bands. Spectrum sharing improves spectrum utilization. The coverage performance improvement and interference caused by spectrum sharing need to be investigated. To this end, this paper analyzes the performance of spectrum sharing between HAP network and terrestrial network. We firstly generalize the Poisson Point Process (PPP) to curves, surfaces and manifolds to model the distribution of terrestrial Base Stations (BSs) and HAPs. Then, the closed-form expressions for coverage probability of HAP network and terrestrial network are derived based on differential geometry and stochastic geometry. We verify the accuracy of closed-form expressions by Monte Carlo simulation. The results show that HAP network has less interference to terrestrial network. Low height and suitable deployment density can improve the coverage probability and transmission capacity of HAP network.

Thanks to the advantages of flexible deployment and high mobility, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have been widely applied in the areas of disaster management, agricultural plant protection, environment monitoring, and so on. With the development of UAV and sensor technologies, UAV-assisted data collection for the Internet of Things (IoT) has attracted increasing attention. In this article, the scenarios and key technologies of UAV-assisted data collection are comprehensively reviewed. First, we present the system model, including the network model and the mathematical model of UAV-assisted data collection for IoT. Then, we review the key technologies, including clustering of sensors, UAV data collection mode as well as joint path planning and resource allocation. Finally, the open problems are discussed from the perspectives of efficient multiple access as well as joint sensing and data collection. This article hopefully provides some guidelines and insights for researchers in the area of UAV-assisted data collection for IoT.