Full Physical Layer Simulation Tool to Design Future 77 GHz JCRS-Applications

Abstract

Vehicular communication systems get more and more attention with the upcoming fifth and sixth generation. Hereby, the focus lies on the development of the co-design or co-existence of communications and sensing. So called joints communications and radar sensing systems are seen as one key technology of 6G. As joint systems will have shared waveforms and hardware platforms, there is a huge benefit in cost and space which is one essential argument for the automotive industry. However, to design such a system for new applications like platooning or intersection assistance a physical layer has to be set up to represent the real physical layer properly. The proposed system design closes the lack of such a simulation tool and allows for full physical layer simulations, including e. g. the hardware non-idealities and the channel model for 77 GHz. The whole signal processing chain of the physical layer is built up and will be integrated in the higher layer state-of-the-art simulation frameworks like Veins or Artery in the next step. The communications design is developed in Simulink, whereas the sensing part is discussed. The proposed communications architecture covers several transmission approaches (serial, parallel), a CDMA based spreading, a radio frequency representation, the channel (simulated in a 3D-Ray-Tracing-tool) and the receiver structure (e. g. the synchronisation or the channel estimation). Several design criteria are discussed, like the serial or parallel design architecture, the maximum ratio combining or the phase and frequency compensation method. The whole system architecture is freely available (https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.6482565) and in consequence, the different signal blocks and parameters can be enabled or disabled for evaluations according to future design criteria requirements.INDEX TERMS Hardware non-idealities, connected vehicles, joint communications and radar sensing, millimeter wave technology, physical layer, Simulink.

Evaluating RF Hardware Characteristics for Automotive JCRS Systems Based on PMCW-CDMA at 77GHz

“…They introduced their developed, so-called HermesPy, open-source link level evaluator, which is capable of modeling the communications as well as radar for various waveforms, including also single carrier ones. Our work extends this detailed modeling by [17], which focused specifically on V2V communications, the radar part has now been included and the performance of both was evaluated with respect to RF impairments.…”

“…Based on [17], where the authors presented and tested a mmWave simulation system for vehicular communications at 77 GHz, this model is extended to include the radar detection function. The obtained JCRS system is radar-based since the waveform is PMCW, and automotive radar systems occupy an operation frequency of 77 GHz.…”

“…The underlying communications model has already been presented by the authors for vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communications and discussed with respect to the individual components in [16] and in the recently published work [17]. In the former one, a basic V2V communications model was introduced and evaluated for various modulation schemes.…”

“…Subsequently, the description of the developed JCRS system model follows in chapter III. On the one hand, a summary of the extension of the communications model (published in [17]) is given; on the other hand, the radar sensing part is introduced. However, this work focuses on the hardware components and their corresponding non-idealities.…”

Antenna Setup for Future Joint Radar-Communications – Characteristics and Mounting Positions

“…This is also related to the discussions on whether being radar-centric or communications-centric, i.e., which service to consider as the primary service. Therefore, we take up the discussion of waveforms and we also investigate other waveforms in our current research, mainly Phase Modulated Continuous Wave (PMCW)-CDMA-based solutions (Lübke et al, 2022). But due to the fact that the frequencies at 77 GHz are mainly occupied by FMCW radar systems today, we choose to evaluate FMCW-based systems in this paper.…”