Joint Sensing and Communications Multiple-Access System Design and Experimental Characterization

One solution to addressing the spectral congestion problem is to co-design communications and remote sensing systems to cooperate, such that each system benefits from the presence of one another. In this work, we present a novel joint sensing and communications multiple access system architecture that allows for simultaneous decoding of communications information and radar target tracking and parameter estimation within the same space, time, and frequency continuum. We demonstrate the feasibility of this co-design architecture by implementing it on a network of software defined radios (SDRs). To characterize the system, we consider a scenario where one transceiver transmits an emulated radar return waveform, while a second transceiver simultaneously transmits a communications waveform. A third transceiver receives and processes the emulated radar return and communications waveforms jointly. The radar transmitter and joint sensing and communications receiver acts as a quasi-monostatic tracking radar. We characterize the joint performance of the system using the communications and estimation rate metrics. The results show that the system achieves high throughput and excellent radar tracking performance for the given experiment parameters.