Joint Trajectory and Beamforming Design for Secure Aerial ISAC Systems

Integrated sensing and communication (ISAC), an emerging technology for wireless networks, enables efficient use of scarce spectrum resources by supporting simultaneous communication and sensing. This work investigates the secrecy performance of an uncrewed aerial vehicle (UAV)-assisted ISAC system, in which a UAV operates as an aerial base station to serve multiple ground users while simultaneously transmitting sensing signals to detect potential eavesdroppers. To maximize the average secrecy rate, we jointly optimize the user scheduling, transmit beamforming, receive filtering vector, and the UAV’s flight trajectory. The formulated optimization problem is decomposed into four subproblems, which are transformed into convex forms via successive convex approximation, and is solved iteratively using the block coordinate descent method. Simulation results demonstrate the correctness and effectiveness of the proposed scheme.