Joint Radar and Communication for Next-Generation Automotive Applications

Research Project, 2022 – 2023

Modern vehicles are equipped with a variety of sensors for providing real-time situational awareness, as well various communication technologies to gather information beyond the local sensors’ field of view. Among the sensors, radars play a critical role, due to their robustness to different weather conditions and high accuracy. However, radars emit uncoordinated signals, leading to mutual interference and thereby safety risks. Interference can be mitigated by coordination, which requires low-latency inter-vehicle communication. The core idea of this project is that the vehicular radar can play a dual role to perform joint radar and communication (JRC), providing much faster, reliable, and high-rate links than standard technologies, while simultaneously providing interference-free radar operation. This idea is especially timely as JRC is being considered in the evolution of both radar standardization and 3GPP communication standardization. Hence, this project can provide a major impact in both areas. The specific goals of this project are (i) to specify use cases for JRC, (ii) development and demonstration of on-vehicle JRC chipsets, (iii) exploration of automotive JRC in the context 5G and beyond 5G connectivity, (iv) the development of link-level and network- level models and simulators for rapid testing and prototyping software solutions. The work performed in this project will lead not only to an understanding on JRC in an automotive context for tailored use cases, but also create the world’s first JRC automotive prototype, and create a roadmap for JRC development towards 2030.