IEEE 802.11ad Based Joint Radar Communication Transceiver: Design, Prototype and Performance Analysis

Rapid beam alignment is required to support high-gain millimeter wave (mmW) communication links between a base station (BS) and mobile users (MU). The standard IEEE 802.11ad protocol enables beam alignment at the BS and MU through a lengthy beam training procedure accomplished through additional packet overhead. However, this results in reduced latency and throughput. Auxiliary radar functionality embedded within the communication protocol has been proposed in prior literature to enable rapid beam alignment of communication beams without the requirement of channel overheads. In this work, we propose a complete architectural framework of a joint radar-communication wireless transceiver wherein radar-based detection of MU is realized to enable subsequent narrow beam communication. We provide a software prototype implementation with transceiver design details, signal models and signal processing algorithms. The prototype is experimentally evaluated with realistic simulations in free space and Rician propagation conditions and demonstrated to accelerate the beam alignment by a factor of four while reducing the overall bit error rate (BER) resulting in significant improvement in throughput with respect to standard 802.11ad. Likewise, the radar performance is found to be comparable to commonly used mmW radars.