Decentralized Automotive Radar Spectrum Allocation to Avoid Mutual Interference Using Reinforcement Learning

Nowadays, mutual interference among automotive radars has become a problem of wide concern. In this article, a decentralized spectrum allocation approach is presented to avoid mutual interference among automotive radars. Although decentralized spectrum allocation has been extensively studied in cognitive radio sensor networks, two challenges are observed for automotive sensors using radar. First, the allocation approach should be dynamic as all radars are mounted on moving vehicles. Second, each radar does not communicate with the others so it has quite limited information. A machine learning technique, reinforcement learning, is utilized because it can learn a decision-making policy in an unknown dynamic environment. As a single radar observation is incomplete, a long short-term memory recurrent network is used to aggregate radar observations through time so that each radar can learn to choose a frequency subband by combining both the present and past observations. Simulation experiments are conducted to compare the proposed approach with other common spectrum allocation methods such as the random and myopic policy, indicating that our approach outperforms the others.