Title: Forward Collision Vehicular Radar with IEEE 802.11: Feasibility Demonstration through Measurements,
Abstract: Increasing safety and automation in transportation systems has led to the
proliferation of radar and IEEE 802.11 dedicated short range communication
(DSRC) in vehicles. Current implementations of vehicular radar devices,
however, are expensive, use a substantial amount of bandwidth, and are
susceptible to multiple security risks. Consider the feasibility of using an
IEEE 802.11 orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) communications
waveform to perform radar functions. In this paper, we present an approach that
determines the mean-normalized channel energy from frequency domain channel
estimates and models it as a direct sinusoidal function of target range,
enabling closest target range estimation. In addition, we propose an
alternative to vehicular forward collision detection by extending IEEE 802.11
dedicated short-range communications (DSRC) and WiFi technology to radar,
providing a foundation for joint communications and radar framework.
Furthermore, we perform an experimental demonstration using existing IEEE
802.11 devices with minimal modification through algorithm processing on
frequency-domain channel estimates. The results of this paper show that our
solution delivers similar accuracy and reliability to mmWave radar devices with
as little as 20 MHz of spectrum (doubling DSRC's 10 MHz allocation), indicating
significant potential for industrial devices with joint vehicular
communications and radar capabilities.