Waveform Designs for Joint Wireless Communication and Radar Sensing: Pitfalls and Opportunities

Special attention has been devoted to joint wireless communication and radar sensing concepts over the past decades. Considerable confusion arose, however, with regard to waveform designs. In this article, various joint wireless communication and radar sensing waveform schemes are reviewed and classified into two categories. Disadvantages and limitations of each category are clarified theoretically. It is shown that waveforms designed merely in conventional time and frequency domains cannot fulfill the conflict requirements posed by radar and wireless communication. As a solution to this fundamental challenge, the multidimensional waveform concepts, along with a generalized correlation model, are proposed for joint wireless communication and radar sensing. To showcase our current research advances in this emerging area, several concrete waveforms designed in multiple dimensions are introduced. Theoretical analysis is validated by simulations and outfield demonstration experiments. It is shown that the suggested waveforms can simultaneously achieve superior detection and communication performances with shared spectrum resources.