Software-Defined MIMO OFDM Joint Radar-Communication Platform with Fully Digital mmWave Architecture

TL;DR

This paper presents a fully digital, software-defined MIMO OFDM joint radar-communication system operating at 24 GHz mmWave band, enabling simultaneous high-data-rate communication and high-resolution radar imaging using commercial hardware.

Contribution

It introduces a real-time, full-duplex MIMO JRC platform with fully digital architecture for mmWave bands, demonstrating practical implementation and dual-functionality.

Findings

Successful real-time operation with commercial SDRs

Simultaneous high-data-rate communication and radar imaging

Effective use of fully digital MIMO architecture at 24 GHz

Abstract

Large-scale deployment of connected vehicles with cooperative sensing and maneuvering technologies increases the demand for vehicle-to-everything communication (V2X) band in 5.9 GHz. Besides the V2X spectrum, the under-utilized millimeter-wave (mmWave) bands at 24 and 77 GHz can be leveraged to supplement V2X communication and support high data rates for emerging broadband applications. For this purpose, joint radar-communication (JRC) systems have been proposed in the literature to perform both functions using the same waveform and hardware. In this work, we present a software-defined multiple-input and multiple-output (MIMO) JRC with orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) for the 24 GHz mmWave band. We implement a real-time operating full-duplex JRC platform using commercially available software-defined radios and custom-built mmWave front-ends. With fully digital MIMO architecture, we demonstrate simultaneous data transmission and high-resolution radar imaging capabilities of MIMO OFDM JRC in the mmWave band.