Target Detection in Joint Frequency Modulated Continuous Wave (FMCW) Radar-Communication System

Motivated by the need of combining hardware, energy and spectrum resources of various components towards developing autonomous vehicular systems, we propose a joint FMCW radar and communication (RadCom) system. The proposed waveform consists of frequency-modulated chirps, used for both radar and communications. Target detection is done using an FFT-based procedure. In contrast to the conventional FMCW-radar receiver, we have considered a short chirp duration to increase the data rate, resulting in a challenging scenario with non-negligible frequency components after mixing, corresponding to the transition between successive chirp symbols. For this scenario we obtained a closed-form analytic solution for detection and false-alarm probabilities, and simulated the communication system performance using a non-coherent receiver. Finally, simulation results are presented to demonstrate the performance of target detection and communication symbol decoding for the proposed joint RadCom system.