Combined Radar-Based Communication and Interference Mitigation for Automotive Applications

Summary

Radar is becoming standard equipment in all modern cars, supporting for example cruise control and parking assist. Similarly, vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) will become more widely used, to provide fast dissemination of safety-related information. However, automotive radar and communication both face challenges when extending their use since interference between radar signals leads to reduced performance and eventually sensing failures. Similary, short-range low-latency communication through the 802.11p V2V standard will break down when too many devices are active simultaneously. The ambition of this project is to address both issues through an integrated solution, by sharing the bandwidth at millimeter-range frequencies (from 28 GHz and above) between a radar and a communication system enabling interference management and reliable low-latency inter-vehicle links. This leads to a joint radar and communication (RadCom) system, which will:

1. Lead two increased safety by adding communication capability to the automotive radars which can be used to fuse radar data of various vehicles both to provide see-through driving and to increase radar detection probability and precision.
2. Lead to increased effciency in terms of both spectrum and cost, due to the co-designed implementation of two functionalities.
3. Lead to increased integration of radar and communication systems, thus reducing cost.
4. Open up for new applications due to new functionality provided by the integration of sensor and communication functions.

The project will focus on developing expertise in the area of joint radar and communication as well as the realisation of a demonstrator. Moreover, the project will provide inputs to regulation bodies for future radar standards in the 60 GHz band.

Halmstad University is responsible for the demontrator development and the system analysis together with SAAB.