JCR70: A Low-Complexity Millimeter-Wave Proof-of-Concept Platform for a Fully-Digital SIMO Joint Communication-Radar

A fully-digital wideband joint communication-radar (JCR) with a single-input-multiple-output (SIMO) architecture at the millimeter-wave (mmWave) band will enable high joint communication and radar performance with enhanced design flexibility. A quantized receiver with few-bit analog-to-digital converters (ADCs) will enable a practical JCR solution with reduced power consumption for futuristic portable devices and autonomous vehicles. In this paper, we present a joint communication-radar proof-of-concept platform, named JCR70, to evaluate and demonstrate the performance of these JCR systems using real channel measurements in the 71–76 GHz band. We develop this platform by extending a mmWave communication set-up with an additional full-duplex radar receiver and by capturing the SIMO JCR channel using a moving antenna on a sliding rail. To characterize the JCR performance of our developed testbed, we conduct several indoor and outdoor experiments and apply traditional as well as advanced processing algorithms on the measured data. The experimental results show that the quantized receiver with 2–4 b ADCs generally performs quite close to the high-resolution ADC for a signal-to-noise ratio of up to 5 dB. Additionally, we compare the performance of our JCR70 platform with the INRAS Radarbook, which is a state-of-the-art automotive radar evaluation platform at 77 GHz.