Automotive Radar and MmWave MIMO V2X Communications: Interference or Fruitful Coexistence?

Radar-aided millimeter wave (mmWave) vehicular communication can efficiently reduce the training overhead associated with configuring/reconfiguring the large antenna arrays used to operate at these frequencies. Previous work neglects, however, the effect of the interference of the radar signal into the communication receiver. In this paper, we consider a cellular-supported vehicle-to-infrastructure millimeter wave system with a base station-mounted radar used to speed up the beam training process. We develop a measurement setup to evaluate the radar interference levels that appear at the communication receiver in the vehicle. We also implement a simulation of this vehicular system that can be used to obtain performance results that account for the effect of the radar interference. The spectral efficiency results show that the radar-aided vehicular communication system at mmWave does not suffer from a significant impact of the radar-to-communication interference, even when the car is close to the base station-mounted radar.