Abstract

Millimetre wave communication will potentially form the backbone of vehicle-to-X communications in next generation intelligent transportation systems due to the high bandwidth. Existing sub-6 GHz V2X communication strategies such as dedicated short range communication services on IEEE802.11p based wireless technology, device-to-device (D2D-LTE V2X) communications and cellular LTE-V2X communications modes operate below 6GHz and hence are restricted to tens of megabits per second data rates with latency of the order of few milliseconds. Due to the high propagation loss at millimetre wave carrier frequencies, they are meant to operate in short range line-of-sight conditions with highly directional beams realised through beamforming. In high mobility environments, rapid beam training will result in considerable overhead and significant deterioration of latency. Alternatively, auxiliary sensors such as GPS or standalone radars can aid in beam alignment of the communication systems. However, the deployment of auxiliary sensors increases the cost and complexity in terms of synchronisation and data processing as well as pose challenges in terms of interference.

An integrated sensing and communications framework based on IEEE 802.11ad protocol is presented, in the talk, to overcome these limitations. The augmentation of the radar functionality within the existing communication framework will result in both systems cohabiting a common spectrum and sharing hardware resources. This will reduce cost and complexity as well as mitigate interference. The talk will present the recommendation to enable the IEEE 802.11ad framework to support for radar-based localisation of mobile users while maintaining compatibility with the existing communication protocol requirements; signal processing and online learning-based algorithms for supporting radar-based detection and localisation of mobile users as well as estimation of channel conditions in both static and quasi-static scenarios. In the end, the complete end-to-end software prototype for baseband, digital and analogue front-end of the dual functional transceiver at the base station; the hardware prototype of the ISAC via hardware-software co-design and fixed-point analysis; and the evaluation of the improvement of the communication link metrics (throughput, bit error rate) due to ISAC will be demonstrated.

Speaker’s profile

Sumit J. Darak received a bachelor’s degree from Pune University, India, in 2007 and a PhD from the School of Computer Engineering, Nanyang Technological University (NTU), Singapore, in 2013. He is currently an Associate Professor and Dean of Academic Affairs (DoAA) at IIIT-Delhi, India. He also worked as a 5G Consultant with VVDN Technologies, India, and Digital Hardware Consultant with Apexplus Technologies, India. His current research interests include the design of efficient algorithms and mapping to reconfigurable and intelligent architectures for wireless, radar and artificial intelligence (AI) applications.

Dr Darak is a recipient of the DST Inspire Faculty Award, Best Demo Award at CROWNCOM 2016, Second-Best Student Paper Award at IEEE Digital Avionics Systems Conference (DASC) in 2017, Young Scientist Paper Award at URSI 2014 and 2017, Second-Best Poster Award at COMSNETS 2019, Best Paper Award in AIML Systems 2021, Design Contest Award in VLSID 2022 and 2023, and IEEE APCCAS 2024 Design Contest Award. From industry, he has received National Instruments (NI) Academic Research Grant (2017, 2018), and Qualcomm Innovation Fellowship (2022, 2023).