Hybrid Radar Fusion with Quantization: CRB-Rate Trade-offs and ADC Dynamic Range

TL;DR

This paper investigates the impact of low-resolution ADCs on hybrid radar fusion systems, revealing fundamental trade-offs between sensing accuracy and communication rate constrained by ADC dynamic range.

Contribution

It derives an upper bound on the quantized CRB for AoA estimation and formulates optimization problems to explore CRB-rate trade-offs in HRF systems.

Findings

HRF performance degrades when ADC dynamic range is exceeded.

Increasing ADC resolution beyond a point yields minimal communication rate gains.

A fundamental sensing-communication trade-off is characterized via CRB-rate boundaries.

Abstract

Recent advancements have underscored the relevance of low-resolution analog-to-digital converters (ADCs) in integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) systems. Nevertheless, their specific impact on hybrid radar fusion (HRF) remains largely unexplored. In HRF systems, where uplink (UL) paths carry direct and reflected signals in the same frequency band, the reflected signal is often significantly weaker, making HRF performance particularly sensitive to ADC resolution. To study this effect, we use the quantized Cram\'er-Rao bound (CRB) to measure sensing accuracy. This work derives an upper bound on the quantized CRB for angle of arrival (AoA) estimation and explores CRB-rate trade-offs through two formulated optimization problems. Simulation results indicate that HRF becomes infeasible when the dynamic range of the received signal exceeds the dynamic range supported by the ADC, which is inherently limited by its resolution. Furthermore, the UL communication rate does not increase significantly when the ADC resolution is raised beyond a certain threshold. These observations highlight a fundamental trade-off between sensing and communication performance: while HRF performance benefits from higher ADC resolutions, the corresponding gains in communication rate plateau. This trade-off is effectively characterized using CRB-rate boundaries derived through simulation.