Investigating the IEEE 802.11ad Standard for Millimeter Wave Automotive Radar

Millimeter wave (mmWave) technology is widely used for automotive radar applications, like adaptive cruise control and obstacle detection. Unlike conventional radar waveforms which are usually propriety, this paper explores the use of a consumer wireless local area network (WLAN) waveform in the 60GHz unlicensed mmWave band for automotive radar applications. In particular, this paper develops a joint framework of long range automotive radar (LRR) and vehicle-to-vehicle communication (V2V) at 60 GHz by exploiting the special data-aided structure (repeated Golay complimentary sequences) of an IEEE 802.11ad single carrier physical layer (SCPHY) frame. This framework leverages the signal processing algorithms used in the typical WLAN receiver for time and frequency synchronization to perform radar parameter estimation. The initial simulation results show that it is possible to achieve the desired range accuracy of 0.1 m with a very high probability of detection (above 99%) using the preamble of a SCPHY frame. Furthermore, the velocity estimation algorithm achieves the desired accuracy of 0.1 m/s at high SNR using the preamble and pilot words of only a single frame.