Pilot Based Stepped-Carrier OFDM to Retrieve High Resolution Range-Velocity Profile in Joint Vehicular Communication and Radar Systems

Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) is a good candidate for joint radar sensing and vehicular communication convergence in the 77-81GHz band. Recent publications show the interest of using pilot based OFDM to ensure good detection skills while maintaining, at the same time, a good vehicular communication link. Nevertheless, OFDM is a wide band signal that requires ADC's with fast sampling rates which hinds its practical use in automotive and low-cost radars. To reduce the baseband bandwidth of the OFDM signal and still reaching a high-resolution range profile (HRR), Stepped-Carrier OFDM has been proposed and seems to be efficient for radar sensing skills. This paper presents a pilot based Stepped-Carrier OFDM processing that allows an efficient radar detection skill in a joint radar and communication system. Based on results obtained in the current paper, our work highlights benefit of a dynamic pilot allocation depending on the vehicular environment while reducing the needed sampling rate of the radar receiver.