Adaptive Waveform Design for Automotive Joint Radar-Communication Systems

Unified waveform design for automotive joint radar-communications (JRC) leverages the scarce spectrum efficiently and has become a key topic for investigation of late. Designing such a waveform necessitates meeting the requirements of both systems, thereby making it a challenging task. The contribution of this paper is to formulate the JRC design problem into an optimization problem and propose an algorithm to maximize the signal-to-clutter-plus-noise-ratio (SCNR) of radar system and signal-to-noise-ratio (SNR) at communicating vehicle, simultaneously. Central to this are the exploitation of the communication link to acquire environment/ channel information and enhance radar tasks, flexibility to impart trade-off between the two systems during design as well the formulation of the optimization problem to include sidelobe constraints and yield solutions robust to Doppler shifts. The designed waveforms exhibit enhanced radar performance in terms of probability of detection and communication performance in terms of bit error rate (BER), while taking into account the trade-off between two systems. The numerical simulations corroborate the claim of optimized performance with environment/ channel information, ease of effecting trade-off and the use of design flexibility.