Software prototype of IEEE 802.11ad based joint radar communication receiver

Abstract

Rapid beam alignment is required to support high gain millimeter wave (mmW) communication links between a base station (BS) and mobile users (MU). The standard IEEE 802.11ad protocol enables beam alignment at the BS andMUthrough a lengthy beam training procedure accomplished through additional packet overhead. However, this results in reduced latency and throughput. Auxiliary radar functionality embedded within the communication protocol has been proposed in prior literature to enable rapid beam alignment of communication beams without the requirement of channel overheads. In this thesis, we propose a complete architectural framework of an IEEE 802.11ad based joint radar-communication wireless receiver. We provide a software prototype implementation with receiver design details. The prototype is experimentally evaluated with realistic simulations in free space and Rician propagation conditions and demonstrated to accelerate the beam alignment by a factor of four while reducing the overall bit error rate (BER) resulting in significant improvement in throughput with respect to standard 802.11ad.