RadChat: Spectrum Sharing for Automotive Radar Interference Mitigation

In the automotive sector, both radars and wireless communication are susceptible to interference. However, combining the radar and communication systems, i.e., radio frequency (RF) communications and sensing convergence, has the potential to mitigate interference in both systems. This article analyses the mutual interference of spectrally coexistent frequency modulated continuous wave (FMCW) radar and communication systems in terms of occurrence probability and impact, and introduces RadChat, a distributed networking protocol for mitigation of interference among FMCW based automotive radars, including self-interference, using radar communications. The results show that RadChat can significantly reduce radar mutual interference in single-hop vehicular networks in less than 80 ms.