Software and hardware prototype of ieee 802.11ad based joint radar communication transmitter

Abstract

Next-generation wireless communication systems are expected to support high-mobility and high-bandwidth vehicle-to-everything (V2X) communications in sub-6 GHz and millimeter wave (mmWave) spectrum. The deployment in mmWave spectrum demands rapid beam alignment of highly directional beams towards the mobile users to achieve the desired throughput. A potential solution investigated in this thesis is a joint radar-communication (JRC) system in the base station in which radar waveforms are embedded within the communication signal to enable accurate localization of the mobile user without the requirement of auxiliary sensors and spectrum. In this thesis, we propose a novel framework for a JRC transmitter based on the mmWave IEEE 802.11ad standard. Through the proposed system, we eliminate the lengthy beam alignment procedure in the standard IEEE 802.11ad protocol to realize shorter beam alignment durations. Next, we design a fixed-point synthesizable architecture of the proposed transmitter and verify its functionality on an FPGA platform. The performance studies of the word-length of the hardware implementation along with hardware IP cores for the transmitter form the third major contribution of the thesis.