Utilizing 5G NR SSB Blocks for Passive Detection and Localization of Low-Altitude Drones

Abstract: With the exponential growth of the unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) industry and a broad range of applications expected to appear in the coming years, the employment of traditional radar systems is becoming increasingly cumbersome for UAV supervision. Motivated by this emerging challenge, this paper investigates the feasibility of employing integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) systems implemented over current and future wireless networks to perform this task. We propose a sensing mechanism based on the synchronization signal block (SSB) in the fifth-generation (5G) standard that performs sensing in a passive bistatic setting. By assuming planar arrays at the sensing nodes and according to the 5G standard, we consider that the SSB signal is sent in a grid of orthogonal beams that are multiplexed in time, with some of them pointing toward a surveillance region where low-altitude drones can be flying. The Cramer-Rao Bound (CRB) is derived as the theoretical bound for range and velocity estimation. Our results demonstrate the potential of employing SSB signals for UAV-like target localization at low SNR.