Coordinated FMCW and OFDM for Integrated Sensing and Communication

Modern vehicles commonly use Frequency Modulated Continuous Wave (FMCW) radar for environmental sensing and Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) for wireless communication. However, operating these systems independently leads to increased hardware complexity, cost, and inefficient spectrum usage. To address this, we propose a coordinated FMCW-OFDM (Co-FMCW-OFDM) system that enables integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) by allowing sensing and communication to share the same RF front end, antennas, and spectral resources. In the proposed ISAC system, the FMCW signal is superimposed on the OFDM signal and serves dual purposes: facilitating bistatic sensing and enabling channel estimation at the receiver end. Based on proposed Co-FMCW-OFDM waveform, we propose two efficient sensing algorithms-fast cyclic correlation radar (FCCR) and digital mixing and down-sampling (DMD)-which significantly reduce system complexity while accurately estimating target range and velocity. We consider a realistic channel model where delays can take any value, not just integer multiples of the sampling period. This leads to a significantly larger number of effective paths compared to the actual number of targets, which makes the sensing, channel estimation, and interference cancellation more challenging. Leveraging the sensing results, we develop a sensing-aided effective channel estimation method which effectively reconstructs the channel under arbitrary delay condition based on successive interference cancellation and propose an interference cancellation scheme that removes the FMCW signal before the OFDM demodulation. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed system achieves superior sensing accuracy, improved channel estimation, and lower bit error rate (BER) compared to conventional OFDM systems with embedded pilots. The proposed scheme demonstrates superior BER performance in comparison to the conventional OFDM-plus-FMCW approach.