On the Achievable Error Rate Performance of Pilot-Aided Simultaneous Communication and Localisation

Abstract: This paper investigates the symbol error rate (SER) performance of the pilot-aided simultaneous communication and localisation (PASCAL) system. A scenario where multiple drones transmit communication signals to a base station (BS), which needs to simultaneously decode the signals and continuously locate the drones' positions during the communication session, is considered. The BS operates in two stages: first, it estimates the drones' location parameters using pilot signals; second, it performs data detection by reconstructing the channel response based on the estimated location parameters. The theoretical analysis presented demonstrates that the estimated location parameters follow Gaussian distributions with means equal to the actual values and variances determined by the root mean square error (RMSE) of the estimator. Using these distributions, the average SER is derived to quantify the impact of localisation errors on decoding performance. This analysis highlights the synergy between communication and localisation, providing valuable insights into the influence of localisation inaccuracies on the performance of location-aware communication systems. Simulations are conducted to validate the theoretical derivations.