Perceptive Mobile Networks for Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Surveillance: From the Perspective of Cooperative Sensing

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) foster the development of multifield applications and also present opportunities for malicious activities, and thus, comprehensive surveillance of UAVs is indispensable. Taking advantage of rapidly developing communication technology, perceptive mobile networks (PMNs) are emerging to integrate sensing capability into cellular networks, which paves the way for ubiquitous networked sensing with cooperation among interconnected base stations (BSs). This article explores key issues in designing PMNs for reliable UAV surveillance, e.g., sensing coverage, network clutter, and the performance tradeoff between sensing and communication. Procedures and key strategies of cooperative sensing in PMNs are also presented, highlighting the method of conducting cooperative sensing by multiple BSs to reap spatial diversity gain. Finally, we depict our vision for future research directions of cooperative sensing in PMNs.