Automotive radar using IEEE 802.11p signals

Autonomous vehicles have led to a surge in research on automotive radar both in academia and industry during the last few years. In this report, we develop a framework for using the dedicated short range communication (DSRC) waveform for the purposes of automotive radar. Our approach operates on the frequency domain channel estimates generated by the OFDM physical layer used in DSRC. We consider a two path channel model, with the first cluster corresponding to direct signal interference and the second cluster corresponding to the signal reflected from the target. The target ranging, direction of arrival and velocity information is encoded in the parameters of the reflected path. We estimate the parameters of the direct and reflected path using a variant of least squares matching pursuit algorithm by exploiting their relative power difference. The performance of the algorithm is evaluated through numerical simulations assuming low power omnidirectional 5 dBi antennas, Swerling type 0 and type 3 target models, 10 MHz transmission bandwidth and different analog-to-digital quantization resolutions. Simulations results show sub-meter accuracy in location estimation for a significant range of target distances. The results are also compared with the Cramer-Rao lower bound which is a theoretical performance benchmark.Electrical and Computer Engineerin