Range Estimation in Frequency-Selective Propagation Environment for Terahertz Automotive Radar

Autonomous driving and highly-automated ad-vanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) require high-resolution information on the host vehicle's surroundings. Therefore, high-resolution capabilities are required in range, Doppler, azimuth, and elevation. Radar systems at the Terahertz (THz) frequency band have the potential of providing high (nearly-optical) reso-lution in these parameters while being compact and lightweight. One of the THz frequency band challenges is the frequency-selective propagation, which results in degraded performance. This work investigates the effect of frequency-selective channel response on range estimation. We compare the cases where the frequency-selective channel response is misspecified and assumed to be flat with the case of perfectly-known channel response. It is shown that frequency-selective misspecification results in lower accuracy and higher threshold signal-to-noise ratio, which reduces the detection range.