EARS: Collaborative Research: Let's share CommRad -- spectrum sharing between communications and radar systems

Purdue University, West Lafayette IN

Investigators

Abstract

The 2012 report to the President entitled "Realizing the Full Potential of Government-Held Spectrum to Spur Economic Growth" recommends releasing portions of the large governmental radar bands to be shared with commercial wireless services. This proposal identifies viable sharing mechanisms between radar and communication systems, which traditionally are operated on non-overlapping bands and are engineered to attain very different goals, so that they may co-exist in a way that is minimally harmful, or ideally beneficial, to both. This research first examines the impact unaltered radar and communication systems would have on one another and thereafter proposes a series of solutions for co-existence that range from realistic solutions with respect to legacy systems (where one of the radar or communication systems remains unaltered) to novel transformative joint designs. The availability of proven robust and optimal sharing mechanisms will pave the way to the development of new wireless services while preserving the critical roles radar systems play in the globally networked society. A multidisciplinary team with expertise in radar and statistical signal processing, cognitive radio and spectrum sharing, communication and information theory, and electromagnetics and propagation, has been assembled to address the following thrusts: 1) understand and model the impact of overlapping frequency bands on current, unaltered radar and communication systems; 2) a radar centric approach, where adaptive radar processing is the key to reduce interference from communication systems; 3) a communication network centric approach, where coding is used to improve resilience to radar interference; 4) the joint design of communication and radar systems, where the information-theoretic understanding of the tradeoffs between communication data rates and estimation rates is at the base of this cooperative design; 5) validation of the models and proposed algorithms by using real experimental data. The results of this research will be timely presented at major national and international professional venues; the general public will be reached by means of modern social media, such as videos of undergraduate-run experiments that demonstrate the developed technology and its practical impact. The developed fundamental framework will form a solid foundation for spectrum sharing between radar and communication systems; the developed technology is expected to be of immediate and far-reaching use for both radar and communication private and public sectors alike. Students involved in this research will receive a cutting edge education and training in radar and communication sciences, acquiring fundamental skills to be successful in the current competitive, diverse, and global workforce market.