Performance of Joint Radar-Communication Enabled Cooperative UAV Network

Recently, the joint radar-communication (JRC) system has been attractive due to the spectrum reuse and all-in-one hardware design, which has abundant advantages in the load-limited unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) systems. In the JRC UAV network, antenna array of each UAV generates two beams. one is used for radar and the other is used for communication to fuse radar data. The UAV working as a fusion center (FCUAV) acquires the radar data from all other UAVs. The outage capacity of the JRC UAV network is derived to measure the performance of communication system. The average cooperative detection area of the JRC UAV network is obtained as the performance metric of radar. Finally, simulation results verify the theoretical analysis of the JRC UAV network. The power allocation ratio of the radar beam power to total available power and the number of UAVs have impact on the average cooperative detection area. The optimal values of these two parameters to achieve the maximum average cooperative detection area are determined numerically.