Can Automotive Radars Form Vehicular Networks?

Radar communications (RadCom) is a spectrally efficient way for removing automotive radar interference and thereby enhancing reliable radar sensing, via a single hardware for both radar and communications. When interference coordination does not use all the RadCom resources, opportunities for communicating additional data arise. We propose a new communication protocol, termed RadNet (for radar network), which forms a vehicular ad-hoc multi-hop network by automotive radars in a distributed manner. Simulation results obtained for high-way use cases show that RadNet can enable several Mbps data links without degrading the radar performance.