Seminar: Wideband Dual-Function Radar Communication Systems
September 29, 2022 – 09:00
Speaker: Athina P. Petropulu
Meeting Room 1st floor MO-27 building, Engineering Department "Enzo Ferrari "
Via Vivarelli 10, 41125 Modena
ABSTRACT: With today’s technology, radio frequency front-end architectures are very similar in radar and wireless communication systems. Further, in an effort to access more bandwidth, wireless systems have been shifting to frequency bands that have been traditionally occupied by radar systems. Given the hardware and frequency convergence, there is a lot of recent interest in the integration of the radar and communication functions in one system. Such integration will enable more efficient use of spectrum, reduce device size/cost and power consumption, and will also offer the potential for significant performance enhancement of both sensing and communication functions. Dual Function Radar-Communication (DFRC) systems is a class of integrated sensing- communication (ISC) systems that use the same waveform as well as the same hardware platform for both sensing and communication purposes.
Thus, DFRC systems can achieve higher spectral efficiency than most ISC systems, require simpler transmitter hardware and a smaller, less expensive device. DFRC systems are prime candidates for autonomous driving vehicles, unmanned aerial vehicles, surveillance, search and rescue, and networked robots in advanced manufacturing applications that
rely on censing and communications.
In the talk, we will present a novel DFRC system that uses the available bandwidth efficiently for both communication as well as sensing. The system transmits wideband, orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) waveforms and allows the transmit antennas to use subcarriers in a shared fashion. When all subcarriers are used in a shared fashion, the proposed system achieves high communication rate but its sensing performance is limited by the size of the receive array. By reserving some subcarriers for exclusive use transmit antennas (private subcarriers), the communication rate can be traded off for improved sensing performance. The improvement is achieved by using the private subcarriers to construct a large virtual array that yields higher resolution angle estimates. The system is endowed with beamforming capability, via waveform precoding, where the precoding matrix is optimally designed to meet a joint sensing- communication system performance metric. We also present novel hybrid analog-digital architectures for achieving good performance with reduced hardware and energy cost via the use of double-phase shifters.
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