OFDM-based automotive joint radar-communication system

We propose a novel automotive joint radar-communication (JRC) system, where the system first transmits OFDM sub-carriers for radar processing followed by sub-carriers enabling radar and communication functionalities. The receiver processing includes iterative estimation of parameters to alleviate the shortage of samples to estimate range. The receiver first estimates the target parameters from the sub-carriers dedicated to radar; these parameters then determine the channel for the communication link. The communication data is then extracted, thereby enabling the use of all the carriers for improving the range estimation. It is shown that the range estimation improves significantly after efficient use of all the sub-carriers. Furthermore, for radar parameter estimation, we propose an effective iterative method based on alternating least square (ALS) to recover the angle of arrival (AoA), Doppler and Range. Numerical results demonstrate the feasibility of our proposed system.