Edge-Enabled UAV Swarm Deployment for Rapid Post-Disaster Search and Rescue

Abstract: This paper presents an optimized Joint Radar-Communication (JRC) system utilizing multiple Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) to simultaneously achieve sensing and communication objectives. By leveraging UAVs equipped with dual radar and communication capabilities, the proposed framework aims to maximize radar sensing performance across all UAVs in challenging environments. The proposed approach focuses on formulating and solving a UAV positioning and power allocation problem to optimize multi-UAV sensing and communications performance over multiple targets within designated zones. Due to the NP-hard and combinatorial nature of the problem, we propose a Distributed JRC-based (DJRC) solution. This solution employs an efficient reward for potential actions and consistently selects the best action that maximizes the reward while ensuring both communications and sensing performance. Simulation results demonstrate significant performance improvements of the proposed solution over state-of-the-art radar- or communication-centric trajectory planning methods, with polynomial complexity dependent on the number of UAVs and linear dependence on the iteration count.