Thu, 12 May, 15:00 - 15:45 UTC
This demo shows a duplex dual function radar and communications (DFRC) system based on agile frequency modulated continuous waveform (FMCW) MIMO radar for vehicular applications. Due to the surroundings and other vehicles block, each automotive radar will have detection blind spot. However, since the blind spot of a vehicle may be detected by other vehicles, the spot information of a vehicle can be obtained through communication with others. In this duplex DFRC system, each radar can broadcast target information around itself and receive information from other radars at the same time of detection, which indirectly improves the detection coverage of radars, reduces the blind area of vehicles and improves safety. The joint design of radar and communications also leads to potential gains in system size, power consumption, and spectrum efficiency. In this duplex DFRC demo, multiple identical FMCW waveforms are mixed with different carriers, and transmitted from a selected subset of MIMO radar transmit elements. The digital message communicated is embedded in the selection of transmit antenna subset and the selection of carriers, which incorporates communication capabilities with minimal effect to the radar transmission. We design a dedicated platform for this demo, which consists of a PC and two DFRC transceivers. The PC serves as the controller and processor, which contains a GUI to define parameters interactively. The DFRC transceivers are developed on the TI mmWave evaluation module, which enables to transmit and receive configured FMCW waveforms with a MIMO radar architecture. As a duplex system, the transceivers can simultaneously detect the target, transmit and receive communication waveforms. This demo has two operation modes. In the hardware mode, the waveforms are transmitted over the air. Audiences can input the transmit messages on both and receive them on the other side. In addition, radar senses the targets in real time and shows the results in the GUI. In the simulation mode, we show that the proposed radar scheme achieves a similar resolution performance compared with traditional automotive radar without conveying the communication message.