Reference Signal Design in OFDM ISAC for Long-Range and High-Speed UAV Detection

With the emergence of the low-altitude economy, the communication and detection issues of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have gained considerable attention. This paper investigates sensing reference signal design for integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) in orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) systems aimed at detecting long-range, high-speed UAVs. To address the ambiguity problem in long-range and high-speed UAV detection, traditional reference signal designs require densely arranged reference signals, leading to significant resource overhead. In addition, long-range detection based on OFDM waveforms faces challenges from inter-symbol interference (ISI). To address these issues, this paper first proposes a reference signal pattern that supports long-range detection and resists ISI, achieving the maximum unambiguous detection range of the system with reduced resource overhead. Then, to address the challenge of high-speed detection, the paper incorporates range-rate into the Chinese Remainder Theorem-based method. Through the proper configuration of sensing reference signals and the cancellation of ghost targets, this approach significantly increases the unambiguous detection velocity while minimizing resource usage and avoiding the generation of ghost targets. The effectiveness of the proposed methods is validated through simulations. Simulation results show that compared with the traditional sensing reference signal design, our proposed scheme can reduce 72% overhead of reference signals for long-range and high-speed UAV detections.