Predictive Beam Tracking for Sea-Air Communication under Wave-Induced Disturbances
In the sea-air communications system consisting of an uncrewed aerial vehicle (UAV) and an uncrewed surface vehicle (USV), the six-degree-of-freedom (6-DoF) motion of the USV under wave-induced disturbances may lead to severe misalignment of communication beams. In this paper, we develop a wide- and narrow-beam switching scheme based on an extended Kalman filter (EKF) algorithm. Specifically, in the wide-beam mode, the UAV transmits an integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) signal to provide full USV coverage and estimate the position of the communication receiver (CR) mounted on the USV. In the narrow-beam mode, the UAV forms a highly directional beam based on the position estimates of the CR for high-rate communication. In the EKF framework, we derive a state evolution model for the CR by incorporating wave-induced disturbance loads into the surge, sway, and yaw dynamics of the USV. In addition, we further analyze the impacts of sea clutter and sea state on the measurement equation, which is constructed using observations from multiple scatterers arising from the extended-target characteristics of the USV. Finally, we formulate a time allocation optimization problem to balance the time durations of the wide- and narrow-beam modes under different sea states, considering both robust USV state sensing and high-rate communication. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed scheme achieves consistently good tracking performance compared with conventional and neural-network-based methods.