Co-existence Between a Radar System and a Massive MIMO Wireless Cellular System

TL;DR

This paper investigates the coexistence of a 5G massive MIMO cellular system with radar in the same frequency band, highlighting the impact of radar clutter and the effectiveness of large antenna arrays for interference mitigation.

Contribution

It introduces a system model accounting for radar clutter and evaluates linear receivers, demonstrating large-scale antennas improve robustness against interference.

Findings

Radar clutter significantly affects cellular system performance.

Large antenna arrays enhance robustness against clutter.

Linear receivers can mitigate interference effectively.

Abstract

In this paper we consider the uplink of a massive MIMO communication system using 5G New Radio-compliant multiple access, which is to co-exist with a radar system using the same frequency band. We propose a system model taking into account the reverberation (clutter) produced by the radar system at the massive MIMO receiver. Then, we propose several linear receivers for uplink data-detection, ranging by the simple channel-matched beamformer to the zero-forcing and linear minimum mean square error receivers for clutter disturbance rejection. Our results show that the clutter may have a strong effect on the performance of the cellular communication system, but the use of large-scale antenna arrays at the base station is key to provide increased robustness against it, at least as far as data-detection is concerned.