Increasingly larger frequencies are being used for wireless communication systems. As a result, wireless communication services are getting very close to short-range radar frequency bands, which include both automotive and indoor personal radars. The coexistence of radars and communication devices in the same spectrum in next-generation networks may therefore lead to mutual interference that will compromise radar safety and communication throughput. In such an environment, interference from radar to communication and communication to radar, as well as radar mutual interference should be considered. As radars tend to use relatively large powers to overcome the round-trip path loss, they may cause error bursts to communication data. Conversely, data communication interference will be interpreted as extra noise for radar signal processing, thereby limiting their performance. The OTFS-RADCOM project addresses the problem of mutual interference in spectrally congested wireless environments, such as vehicular networks, via a novel co-design of radar and communications systems by implementing both functionalities on a single hardware with a joint Orthogonal Time-Frequency-Space (OTFS) waveform. Such dual-functional waveforms can perform radar sensing and communications simultaneously and hold great potential for beyond 5G networks in terms of mitigating interference and enabling efficient spectrum utilization.
Radars and communication systems are integral to modern cars from the perspective of traffic safety and efficiency. To achieve situational awareness and navigate safely in traffic scenarios, vehicles require accurate position information of surrounding objects, such as trucks, cyclists, pedestrians and other (static and mobile) vehicles. To this end, multiple radars are deployed on different sides of modern vehicles to sense the environment and take necessary control actions. In addition, vehicle-to-everything (V2X) communications, including vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) and vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I), constitute a crucial technology for a variety of active safety and traffic management applications (e.g. to broadcast cooperative awareness messages and location/velocity information of the transmitting vehicle, vehicle platooning, cooperative automated driving, extended sensing). These two technologies, radar and V2X communications, provide an intelligent transportation system (ITS) service for the society by significantly reducing the number of accidents and enabling efficient resource usage (fuel consumption, time, labor, etc.). Hence, it is important to mitigate the interference between radar and communications to ensure proper functioning of both systems. The OTFS-RADCOM project aims to solve this highly challenging interference problem via dual-functional system and waveform design on a joint hardware platform.
The main objective of this project is to design a high-performance integrated radar-communications system for vehicular safety applications that can simultaneously perform radar sensing to detect the objects in the environment and communicate with other vehicles, pedestrians, cyclists and traffic infrastructures to provide cooperative situational awareness. The key idea is to turn the problem of spectral co-existence into an advantage: rather than considering radar and communications as two separate systems competing for the same frequency resources, this project aims to co-design the two systems on a single hardware, which brings spectrum/energy/hardware efficiency and mitigates mutual interference, thereby providing highly reliable sensing and increasing traffic safety.
