English

Reliable UAV Detection with ISAC

Signal Processing 2026-05-25 v1
Authors: Stephan Saur , Mark Doll , Artjom Grudnitsky , Silvio Mandelli , Lucas Giroto , Marcus Henninger , Thorsten Wild
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Abstract

Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) detection is one prominent use case of Integrated Sensing and Communication (ISAC) systems in 5G-Advanced and future 6G networks. In this paper, we present experimental results for the detection of a small UAV using unmodified commercial 5G hardware for mono-static Orthogonal Frequency-Division Multiplexing (OFDM) radar and compare them with the expected performance based on models for link budget and hardware impairments. We show that reliable detection with sub-meter accuracy is still possible in over 500 meters distance in a challenging radio environment rich of strong clutter.

Keywords

unmanned aerial vehicle communications radar-based vital sign monitoring

Cite

@article{arxiv.2605.23561,
  title  = {Reliable UAV Detection with ISAC},
  author = {Stephan Saur and Mark Doll and Artjom Grudnitsky and Silvio Mandelli and Lucas Giroto and Marcus Henninger and Thorsten Wild},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2605.23561},
  year   = {2026}
}

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