Millimeter Wave Vehicular Communication Radar

Surface transportation safety can be enhanced by the use of wireless technologies, mainly automotive radar and vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communication. Automotive radar provides a high-resolution low-latency approach for a continuous automatic detection and ranging of both communication-enabled and non-communication-enabled transportation users. V2V systems rely on the collaborative communication between vehicles to achieve a real-time cooperative detection and ranging. They can operate beyond the line-of-sight constraints of radar solutions. Combining both these wireless technologies would provide a hybrid detection and ranging application that would benefit from mutual sharing of information between radar and communication using the same frequency band and hardware resources. Furthermore, using the mmWave band will provide a high data rate for communication and better accuracy & resolution for radar operation. This will enable automotive safety applications to simultaneously achieve ultra-low latency and high range of operation, with advantages of reduced cost, size, better performance and efficient spectrum usage for the vehicles of tomorrow. In the past half-decade, a number of joint communication-radar approaches have been considered, which exploits the existing radar/communication waveforms that are usually ad-hoc designed and is not completely integrated as they rely on time, frequency or code division ideas.

 

Leveraging the use of a mmWave consumer wireless local area network (WLAN) standard, WNCG graduate student Preeti Kumari, Universidade de Vigo Professor Nuria González Prelcic, and WNCG Professor Robert Heath developed a combined vehicular communication-radar waveform. In particular, they have exploited the use of the special structure (repeated Golay complementary sequences) of the single carrier preamble in IEEE 802.11ad to develop a joint framework of long range automotive radar (LRR) and vehicle-to-vehicle communication (V2V) at 60 GHz. This framework leverages the signal processing algorithms used in the typical WLAN receiver for carrier frequency offset estimation and channel estimation for radar parameter estimation. Their initial results show that the IEEE 802.11ad waveform works well for radar.

 

The extended summary of the work has been submitted to IEEE 49th Annual Conference on Information Sciences and Systems (CISS), 2015. The preprint is available only for affiliates.

 

This research was partially supported by the U.S. Department of Transportation through the Data-Supported Transportation Operations and Planning (D-STOP) Tier 1 University Transportation Center.