Joint Radar-Communication Strategies for Autonomous Vehicles: Combining Two Key Automotive Technologies

Self-driving cars constantly assess their environment to choose routes, comply with traffic regulations, and avoid hazards. To that aim, such vehicles are equipped with wireless communications transceivers as well as multiple sensors, including automotive radars. The fact that autonomous vehicles implement both radar and communications motivates designing these functionalities in a joint manner. Such dualfunction radar-communications (DFRC) designs are the focus of a large body of recent work. These approaches can lead to substantial gains in size, cost, power consumption, robustness, and performance, especially when both radar and communications operate in the same range, which is the case in vehicular applications.