Joint Trajectory and Resource Allocation Design for RIS-Assisted UAV-Enabled ISAC Systems

With the burgeoning investigative interest in integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) technology, further enhancing the performance of ISAC systems and establishing a more general system for seamlessly incorporating diverse communication and sensing (C&S) functional priorities in the design of communication systems have become the primary focus in this field. To tackle these, we propose a novel reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS)-assisted unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)-enabled ISAC system, where the dual-functional UAV transmits signals to multi-user and conducts sensing missions simultaneously. Specifically, we aim to maximize the weighted sum of average sum-rate and sensing signal-noise-to-ratio (SNR), while exploring the inherent trade-off between them, by jointly designing the RIS's phase shift, the UAV's trajectory, the dual-function radar-communication beamforming (DFRC-BF), and the communication users' scheduling. To address the formulated problem, an iterative alternating optimization-based algorithm is proposed for obtaining an effective suboptimal solution. Numerical results not only verify the performance superiority of the proposed scheme over baseline schemes, but also unveil its capability of balancing the inherent trade-off between C&S functions.