Integrated communication-sensing-navigation-control for low-altitude digital-intelligent networks: architecture, enabling technologies, and experimental validation

Abstract

The rapid advancement of the low-altitude economy (LAE) necessitates a fundamental shift from fragmented systems toward deeply integrated communication, sensing, navigation, and control capabilities. To this end, this paper proposes a low-altitude digital-intelligent network (LADIN) as an overarching architecture, with integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) serving as the core enabling technology that pervasively unifies its three layers. At the heterogeneous infrastructure layer, we detail an ISAC waveform design based on orthogonal frequency division multiplexing, enabling dual-purpose hardware to simultaneously achieve high-speed data transmission and high-precision environmental sensing. Within the intelligent data fusion layer, ISAC's role expands into a multimodal fusion paradigm, providing the crucial electromagnetic sensing modality. This layer constructs a unified spatiotemporal feature space by introducing pluggable back-projection adapters and spatiotemporal modeling. These adapters systematically integrate heterogeneous data from ISAC, optical cameras, and light detection and ranging (LiDAR) by inverting their respective observation models, thereby overcoming representational disparities and association ambiguities. At the service and management layer, this coherent representation directly drives algorithmic processes and control policies. ISAC resources are virtualized into dynamically allocable assets, enabling closed-loop control that responds to the real-time state of the feature space, such as reconfiguring base station operational modes based on live situational awareness. Validation through multi-frequency collaborative sensing and multimodal fusion use cases demonstrates significant performance gains in tracking robustness, detection of near-zero radar cross-section targets such as balloons, and seamless urban airspace governance, conclusively establishing the transformative potential of a deeply integrated, ISAC-centric approach for future LAE systems.

Keywords

Low-altitude economy / Integrated sensing and communication / Airspace management / Uncrewed aerial vehicles / Cyber-physical system

RIGHTS & PERMISSIONS

Zhejiang University Press