Antenna Setup for Future Joint Radar-Communications – Characteristics and Mounting Positions

The development of millimeter wave systems is driven by the strong trend toward new communications generations and especially by the emerging joint radar and communications design approach. Safety-critical applications like platooning or intersection assistance will significantly benefit from the combination of sensing and communications. While radar performs a channel measurement and thus, needs a wide field of view (especially in city/intersection scenarios), communications aims to minimize the interference for other not addressed receivers (e. g. in a platoon) by a focused antenna design. The proposed work extends the analysis of the influence of various antenna positioning for a typical automotive scene by taking also different characteristics (antenna gain, half power beamwidth, and sidelobe level) into account. Hereby, it is mandatory to investigate the communications and sensing performance simultaneously. The positions at the front bumper – typical for radar sensors – and especially at the left mirror convinced regarding the vehicular communications as well as the sensing behaviour. Applying focused antennas is promising, however, has also limits if the signals are not received out of the main beam but out of the sidelobes, resulting in a critical communications performance. Thus, beam steering is recommended to be applied in the future.