Joint Radar and Communication Design: Applications, State-of-the-Art, and the Road Ahead

By Fan Liu, Christos Masouros, Athina P. Petropulu, Hugh D. Griffiths, Lajos Hanzo. IEEE Transactions on Communications, 2019

1,850 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Sharing of the frequency bands between radar and communication systems has attracted substantial attention, as it can avoid under-utilization of otherwise permanently allocated spectral resources, thus improving efficiency. Further, there is increasing demand for radar and communication systems that share the hardware platform as well as the frequency band, as this not only decongests the spectrum, but also benefits both sensing and signaling operations via the full cooperation between both functionalities. Nevertheless, the success of spectrum and hardware sharing between radar and communication systems critically depends on high-quality joint radar and communication designs. In the first part of this paper, we overview the research progress in the areas of radar-communication coexistence and dual-functional radar-communication (DFRC) systems, with particular emphasis on application scenarios and technical approaches. In the second part, we propose a novel transceiver architecture and frame structure for a DFRC base station (BS) operating in the millimeter wave (mmWave) band, using the hybrid analog-digital (HAD) beamforming technique. We assume that the BS is serving a multi-antenna user equipment (UE) over a mmWave channel, and at the same time it actively detects targets. The targets also play the role of scatterers for the communication signal. In that framework, we propose a novel scheme for joint target search and communication channel estimation, which relies on omni-directional pilot signals generated by the HAD structure. Given a fully-digital communication precoder and a desired radar transmit beampattern, we propose to design the analog and digital precoders under non-convex constant-modulus (CM) and power constraints, such that the BS can formulate narrow beams towards all the targets, while pre-equalizing the impact of the communication channel. Furthermore, we design a HAD receiver that can simultaneously process signals from the UE and echo waves from the targets. By tracking the angular variation of the targets, we show that it is possible to recover the target echoes and mitigate the resulting interference to the UE signals, even when the radar and communication signals share the same signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). The feasibility and efficiency of the proposed approaches in realizing DFRC are verified via numerical simulations. Finally, the paper concludes with an overview of the open problems in the research field of communication and radar spectrum sharing (CRSS).

Subfields: Aerospace Engineering

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/99c7257865ead39bd1ed9456bee31260174b1467

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Citations in the corpus

UAV-Enabled Integrated Sensing and Communication: Opportunities and Challenges (2022, methodology): “By leveraging advanced multiple-input and multiple-output (MIMO) and millimeterwave (mmWave)/terahertz (THz) technology, ISAC is expected to provide high-throughput, ultra-reliable, and low-latency wireless communications, as well as ultra-accurate and highresolution wireless sensing in 6G [1], [2].”
An Overview of Signal Processing Techniques for Joint Communication and Radar Sensing (2021, neutral): “…interest, with results having been re-ported under various names, such as Radar-communications (RadCom) [1], joint radar (and) communications (JRC) [7], [9], [11], joint communication (and) radar (JCR) [20], [22], joint communication and radar/radio sensing (JCAS) [23], [24], and dual-function(al)…”
Optimal Transmit Beamforming for Integrated Sensing and Communication (2021, neutral): “1In the literature, the ISAC is also referred to as joint radar communications (JRC) [2], joint communication and radar (JCR) [3], dual-functional radar communications (DFRC) [4], [5], radar-communications (RadCom) [6], and joint communication and radar/radio sensing (JCAS) [1].”
Integrating Sensing and Communications for Ubiquitous IoT: Applications, Trends, and Challenges (2021, background): “On the other hand, traditional communication waveforms can be designed under sensing capability constraints to achieve an optimal trade-off between S&C [6].”
Integrated Sensing and Communications: Recent Advances and Ten Open Challenges (2023, background): “G IVEN the rapid roll-out of the 5G network, numerous beyond-5G (B5G) and 6G concepts have emerged [1], [2], [3], [4], [5], [6].”
Evolution of NOMA Toward Next Generation Multiple Access (NGMA) for 6G (2021, background): “provides new sensing capabilities and reduces the weight of the equipment in current wireless networks [124], [125].”
Cramér-Rao Bound Optimization for Joint Radar-Communication Beamforming (2021, methodology): “DFRC techniques combine both radar sensing and wireless communications via shared use of the spectrum, the hardware platform and a joint signal processing framework [3], [16].”
A Comprehensive Overview on 5G-and-Beyond Networks With UAVs: From Communications to Sensing and Intelligence (2020, methodology): “Beamforming for JCAS with analog or hybrid analog/digital antenna architectures was studied in [291] and [47], respecitvely.”
Secure Radar-Communication Systems With Malicious Targets: Integrating Radar, Communications and Jamming Functionalities (2019, methodology): “It is noteworthy that the timedomain metric peak-to-average power ratio (PAPR) in the DFRC system can be explicitly dealt with by including PAPR constraints in our optimization problems such as PAPR minimization convex optimization method adopted in [39], or constant modulus (CM) constraints in [12]”
Enabling Joint Communication and Radar Sensing in Mobile Networks—A Survey (2020, methodology): “[5] Provides a detailed introduction to the applications and evolution of JCAS technologies, and a brief overview of coexisting C&S and DFRC (JCAS) systems.”
Bayesian Predictive Beamforming for Vehicular Networks: A Low-Overhead Joint Radar-Communication Approach (2020, methodology): “However, [7] did not take the high-mobility environments into account and their results are thus not suitable for V2X applications.”
Integrated Sensing and Communication Signals Toward 5G-A and 6G: A Survey (2023, methodology): “The application scenarios and key technologies of ISAC are summarized in [5] and [23].”
6G for Vehicle-to-Everything (V2X) Communications: Enabling Technologies, Challenges, and Opportunities (2020, background): “Among others, there have already been tremendous research attempts concerning the integration of sensing and communication (ISAC) [103] and integrated localization and communication (ILAC) [17].”
Towards Multi-Functional 6G Wireless Networks: Integrating Sensing, Communication and Security (2021, methodology): “To strike a trade-off between sensing and communication performance, the sum-weighted sensing and communication quality can also be exploited as an objective function, further leading to a Pareto-optimality of the multi-objective optimization [2].”
Throughput Maximization for UAV-Enabled Integrated Periodic Sensing and Communication (2022, methodology): “For instance, a joint transmit beamforming model was proposed to optimize the radar transmit beam pattern while meeting the requirement of the signal-to-interferenceplus-noise ratio (SINR) at each communication user [19].”
Radar-Assisted Predictive Beamforming for Vehicular Links: Communication Served by Sensing (2020, background): “While the work in [15] proposed a novel framework for mmWave DFRC transceivers, it is not tailored for vehicular communications.”
A Survey on Fundamental Limits of Integrated Sensing and Communication (2021, background): “For example, recently, there have been an increasing number of academic publications on ISAC, ranging from transceiver architecture and frame structure [3], [8], ISAC waveform design [9], [10], [11], joint coding design [12], [13], [14], temporal-spectral-spatial signal processing [15], [16], [17], ”
MIMO Radar for Advanced Driver-Assistance Systems and Autonomous Driving: Advantages and Challenges (2020, background): “As a bonus, PMCW radar also provides certain communication capability [110] and thus can be explored as a dualfunctional radar communica tion system [111].”