Vehicle and UAV Detection and Tracking with LTE Downlink Reference Signals: A Ray-Traced Evaluation on a Mapped Suburban Site with Licensed Base-Station Records

Abstract

Passive sensing on the cellular downlink places the receiver at the user equipment and changes nothing in the network. We report simulation results for an LTE band-3 cell-specific reference signal arm on a ray-traced channel. On a synthetic street canyon the arm is compared with an uplink sounding reference signal arm on the same band, target and scorer: missed-detection probabilities of 0.667 and 0.772. On a surveyed site built from OpenStreetMap footprints and the licensed site record, nine receiver positions along the street track the vehicle at coverage between 29.9 % and 61.7 %; a 283 m lap separates target height from trajectory at 1.6 to 30 m; a 137 m lap on the built-up street tracks a vehicle and a 15 m airborne target on every cell, and 8 receivers at 135 m spacing carry one illuminator's coverage over 1140 m of the street. Potential future work includes extending the analysis to multiple illuminators and varying receiver configurations, and confirmation through over-the-air measurements.