A Tool for the Statistical Investigation of the Automotive Radar Interference

Vehicular radars, which play a key role within advanced driver-assistance systems (ADAS), sense the environment and provide distance and speed estimations about nearby vehicles and objects. However, the increasing penetration rate of such radar systems and the typically very open use of the radar bands is raising the possibility that radars’ performance is vastly degraded because of the interference from the neighboring vehicles. The risk is therefore that applications failures became unacceptably frequent and features like adaptive cruise-control or autopilot are often temporarily disabled. Driven by ongoing discussions on automotive radar spectrum expansion to other bands, we are evaluating the opportunity to exploit the 140 GHz band, and the use of orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) in addition to frequency modulated continuous waveform (FMCW). It is therefore of utmost importance to analyze the impact of the expected interference on radar devices in the scenarios of interest and study possible countermeasures. In this work, we describe a tool to derive, in realistic scenarios such as highways or urban areas, the number and characteristics (such as direction and path length) of potentially interfering signals, which can be then used to evaluate the impact of the interference and the effectiveness of mitigation solutions. Results obtained in a dense highway scenario show that with 100% penetration, the signals transmitted will often enter the field of view (FOV) of the other sensors, either directly or after a single reflection.