Fuse-then-Detect for Passive UAV Localization Using Multi-UE 5G Uplink Signals

Wenyu Huang, Nuria González-Prelcic, Vishnu Ratnam, Murat Bayraktar, Charlie Jianzhong Zhang

Low-altitude uncrewed aerial vehicles (UAVs) can pose growing risks to airspace safety, security, and privacy. Cellular infrastructure can passively sense them without dedicated radar hardware by exploiting integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) technology. Most prior work exploits monostatic sensing or bistatic/multistatic configurations based on downlink measurements. To the best of our knowledge, this paper presents the first uplink framework, where multiple user equipments (UEs) transmit sounding reference signal (SRS) pilots and the base station (BS) receives the UAV-scattered echoes. Sensing from uplink SRS, however, introduces new challenges. Each UE has its own oscillator and timing loop, so the channel estimate at the BS carries residual timing, frequency, and amplitude impairments that corrupt the UAV delay and Doppler. Moreover, the UAV echo is weaker than both the line-of-sight (LOS) path and urban clutter, so detection from a single UE transmission is not reliable. We address these challenges by designing a LOS-referenced synchronization scheme and a joint detector. The synchronization reuses the existing timing advance (TA) command and an adjacent-occasion conjugate product to remove the residuals without additional signaling. Then the detector searches a shared 3D state space and accumulates evidence across UEs. It leverages a normalized contrast that exploits the bistatic geometry. We evaluate the framework in a cluttered urban scene at frequency range 1 (FR1) with four pedestrian UEs and a 100 MHz 5G New Radio (NR) waveform. The proposed pipeline achieves sub-nanosecond synchronization and a 4.84 m median 3D position error.