Joint Bi-Static Radar and Communications Designs for Intelligent Transportation

The cooperation of radar and communications becomes important in vehicular environments due to the demand for radar-assisted communications or communications-assisted radar. In this paper, the tradeoff between bi-static radar and communications in a joint radar-communications setting is studied. We propose three schemes by using time division, superposition or their mixture. For each scheme, three optimization problems are formulated to maximize either the probability of detection for radar subject to a minimum communications rate, the communications rate subject to a minimum probability of detection for radar, or a combined measure of tradeoff. Specifically, given a fixed amount of total time or power for both communications and radar, the optimal power allocation and/or time allocation between radar and communications are derived. Numerical results show that the superposition scheme outperforms the time division scheme and the mixture scheme with considerable performance gains. They also show that the surveillance channel in radar and the communications channel are more important than the direct channel in radar.