Connectivity improvement and Radar-to-Radar interference cancellation in autonomous vehicles

Abstract

Vehicular connectivity and sensing-ability are two essential pre-requisites of Autonomous Vehicles (AVs). Vehicular connectivity enables AVs to exchange infotainment signals required for seamless automation, e.g., row sensor data, traffic information, environments notification, etc. Whereas, intra-vehicular sensors, i.e., most commonly used automotive radars, provide situational awareness by detecting/ mapping surrounding environment. Utilizing the potential of automotive sensors and information sharing can offer complete vehicular automation. Nevertheless, both the aforementioned techniques suffer from several issues. For instance, most commonly used automotive radars are based on Frequency Modulated Continuous Wave (FMCW) which require large bandwidth for their operation. As a consequent, the available radar spectrum may soon reach its capacity, which inturn leads to the problem of Radar-to-Radar (R2R) interference with increasing number of AVs. On the other hand, the available sub-6 GHz band seems incapable to meet the ever-increasing demand of Connected Vehicles (CVs). Indeed, the emergence of mili-meter Wave (mmWave) opens the doors to utilize radar spectrum for vehicular communication, however, it comes along with a challenge of reusing radar spectrum (i.e., to support communication) without hindering vehicles’ sensing ability. Moreover, carrying data traffic over mmWave suffers from the following issues; a) mmWave experiences poor diffraction and high attenuation, and b) the non-zero probability of simultaneous transmission leads to the Vehicular-to-Vehicular (V2V) interference, which scales with the AVs’ density. This dissertation intends towards providing solution for the aforementioned issues. In particular, this work proposes a traffic-based-range-adoption to minimize the R2R interference, further the notion of adaptive range transmission has been utilized to support joint radar-communication over the available radar spectrum. In addition, this work proposes graphical solutions to improve communication reliability over mmWave. Furthermore, a dual slot transmission scheme is propose to mitigate the issue of V2V interference.