A MIMO Joint Communication-Radar Measurement Platform at the Millimeter-Wave Band : (Invited Paper)

A fully-digital wideband joint communication-radar (JCR) at the millimeter-wave (mmWave) band will simultaneously enable high communication and radar performances with enhanced design flexibility. In this paper, we present a measurement platform with a software-defined architecture to evaluate and demonstrate the performance of these JCR systems using real channel measurements. We develop this platform by extending a mmWave communication set-up with an additional full-duplex radar receiver and by capturing the MIMO JCR channel using a moving antenna on a sliding rail. To characterize the JCR performance, we conduct indoor experiments and apply traditional/advanced processing algorithms on the measured data. The results demonstrate that our testbed at 73 GHz with 2 GHz bandwidth can capture the JCR channel with high range/direction estimation accuracy. The comparison between the communication and radar channel shows the potential for improving JCR performance by exploiting the antenna diversity due to widely-separated communication and radar receivers.