Active Search for Low-Altitude UAV Sensing and Communication for Users at Unknown Locations

This paper studies optimal unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) placement to ensure line-of-sight (LOS) communication and sensing for a cluster of ground users possibly in deep shadow, while the UAV maintains backhaul connectivity with a base station (BS). The key challenges include unknown user locations, uncertain channel model parameters, and unavailable urban structure. Addressing these challenges, this paper focuses on developing an efficient online search strategy which jointly estimates channels, guides UAV positioning, and optimizes resource allocation. Analytically exploiting the geometric properties of the equipotential surface, this paper develops an LOS discovery trajectory on the equipotential surface while the closed-form search directions are determined using perturbation theory. Since the explicit expression of the equipotential surface is not available, this paper proposes to locally construct a channel model for each user in the LOS regime utilizing polynomial regression without depending on user locations or propagation distance. A class of spiral trajectories to simultaneously construct the LOS channels and search on the equipotential surface is developed. An optimal radius of the spiral and an optimal measurement pattern for channel gain estimation are derived to minimize the mean squared error (MSE) of the locally constructed channel. Numerical results on real 3D city maps demonstrate that the proposed scheme achieves over 94% of the performance of a 3D exhaustive search scheme with just a 3-kilometer search.