Mitigating Automotive Radar Interference using Onboard Intelligent Reflective Surface

TL;DR

This paper explores using onboard active intelligent reflective surfaces to enhance vehicle radar performance by mitigating interference, demonstrating that active IRS with 15-35 dB gain effectively improves radar visibility in interference scenarios.

Contribution

The study introduces the concept of using active IRS to improve automotive radar interference mitigation, showing its superiority over passive IRS in enhancing radar cross section.

Findings

Passive IRS reduces effective RCS and is counterproductive.

Active IRS with 15-35 dB gain effectively mitigates interference.

Active IRS improves radar performance in interference conditions.

Abstract

The use of automotive radars is gaining popularity as a means to enhance a vehicle's sensing capabilities. However, these radars can suffer from interference caused by transmissions from other radars mounted on nearby vehicles. To address this issue, we investigate the use of an onboard intelligent reflective surface (IRS) to artificially increase a vehicle's effective radar cross section (RCS), or its "electromagnetic visibility." Our proposed method utilizes the IRS's ability to form a coherent reflection of the incident radar waveform back towards the source radar, thereby improving radar performance under interference. We evaluated both passive and active IRS options. Passive IRS, which does not support reflection amplification, was found to be counter-productive and actually decreased the vehicle's effective RCS instead of enhancing it. In contrast, active IRS, which can amplify the reflection power of individual elements, effectively combats all types of automotive radar interference when the reflective elements are configured with a 15-35 dB reflection gain.