Joint Radar Communication With Novel GCC Preamble and Point-Wise Minimum Fusion

Abstract

In this paper, a new preamble waveform design and a corresponding minimum-point processing algorithm at receiver are proposed to perform radar sensing of communication signal echoes. In our design, we consider the millimeter wave (mmWave) 802.11ad/802.11ay communication frame format as a reference. Our proposed new preamble replaces the second pair of single-carrier (SC) Golay complementary code (GCC) used in the preamble of IEEE 802.11ad/802.11ay by orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) GCC waveform, resulting in a SC-OFDM GCC preamble waveform. At the receiver, a point-wise minimum operation is performed on the separate radar ambiguity functions (AF) of the SC-GCC and OFDM-GCC to improve the overall quality of the preamble AF. Furthermore, point-wise minimum processing is applied to fuse the communication data AF and the preamble AF, so as to further enhance the radar sensing quality of the entire communication frame. In addition, theoretical analysis of the performance gain of such radar AF fusion is provided. Both theoretical analysis and simulation results demonstrate that the newly proposed SC-OFDM GCC preamble design and the minimum-point fusion of data AF and preamble AF provide a significant performance improvement for automotive radar sensing. Specifically, the proposed SC-OFDM GCC preamble with minimum-point processing algorithm improves the peak-to-max-sidelobe ratio (PMSR) of radar AF over the conventional 802.11ad/802.11ay preamble. Moreover, the proposed preamble-data AF fusion technique further enhances the PMSR as well as the Doppler resolution over the existing joint radar communication systems (which process either the preamble echo or the data echo only). Finally, the proposed minimum-point processing and data AF fusion are extended from single-frame to multi-frame processing to further improve the Doppler resolution.