Source-linked AI summary
Joint Radar and Communication: A Survey
Zhiyong Feng, Zixi Fang, Zhiqing Wei, Xu Chen, Zhi Quan, Danna Ji
TL;DR
The paper addresses how radar sensing and wireless communication can evolve beyond separate or merely coexisting systems toward mutually beneficial integration. It surveys JRC concepts, applications, and state-of-the-art methods across four operating modes, highlighting collaboration as a fourth stage and identifying future research directions.
Problem
Radar and communication must meet demands for spectrum efficiency, performance gain, multiple tasks, and operation in space- and power-limited scenarios.
Method
The paper synthesizes JRC concepts, applications, state-of-the-art methods, and research directions across coexistence, cooperation, co-design, and collaboration.
Results
The survey identifies collaboration as a fourth JRC operating mode and proposes mutual-benefit operation, including architectures for cooperative multi-radar detection.
Takeaways & Limitations
JRC can support radar-aided networking, cooperative detection, shared hardware, reduced transmission power, and simultaneous radar-resolution and communication-rate improvements.
Abstract
from arXiv · showhide
Joint radar and communication (JRC) technology has become important for civil and military applications for decades. This paper introduces the concepts, characteristics and advantages of JRC technology, presenting the typical applications that have benefited from JRC technology currently and in the future. This paper explores the state-of-the-art of JRC in the levels of coexistence, cooperation, co-design and collaboration. Compared to previous surveys, this paper reviews the entire trends that drive the development of radar sensing and wireless communication using JRC. Specifically, we explore an open research issue on radar and communication operating with mutual benefits based on collaboration, which represents the fourth stage of JRC evolution. This paper provides useful perspectives for future researches of JRC technology.
I. INTRODUCTION
JRC has evolved as radar and communication increasingly converge in hardware, antennas, and digital processing while facing demands for spectrum efficiency, performance gains, and multi-task operation. The survey traces this development and extends existing categorizations with collaboration as a fourth operating mode.
- Motivation: JRC is increasingly needed where space and power are limited, including vehicle-to-vehicle networks, flying ad-hoc networks, and fleets.Communication can also fuse large amounts of detection data rapidly in networked systems.
- Motivation: Radar can assist communication through faster neighbor discovery, more accurate channel estimation, and beam alignment.These mutual demands include spectrum efficiency, performance gain, and support for multiple tasks.
- Motivation: Radar and communication are converging toward joint design as technology reduces their differences in digital processing and antenna structures.Phased arrays and MIMO systems contribute to increasing similarity between the two technologies.
- Research evolution: Research in JRC has progressed from cognitive radar radio and resource-sharing schemes to integrated signal processing, waveform design, and software-defined networks.The survey positions these developments within the broader evolution of jointly designed radar and communication systems.
- Contribution: The paper extends prior JRC categorizations by introducing collaboration as a fourth operating mode and proposing an architecture for cooperative detection by multiple radars.The paper also reviews applications, existing JRC methods, open research problems, and potential solutions.
II. CONCEPTS, CHARACTERISTICS AND ADVANTAGES
JRC integrates radar and communication through shared hardware, redesigned signals, and information exchange, progressing from coexistence toward collaboration. Its stated benefits include architectural simplification, functional scalability, efficiency enhancement, and cost reduction.
- Concepts: JRC enables radar and communication to share a hardware platform while performing different functions simultaneously without negative influence on each other.The paper distinguishes signal-level and networking-level integration.
- Concepts: The four JRC modes are coexistence, cooperation, co-design, and collaboration, representing increasing integration and information sharing.Coexistence uses compatible operation without subsystem information sharing; cooperation shares knowledge, while co-design redesigns both systems.
- Concepts: Collaboration treats networking as a future JRC concept in which multiple devices share and aggregate information through wireless links.The paper connects this model to coordinated and cooperative networks such as V2X systems.
- Characteristics: JRC supports architecture unification and simplification, software-defined functional reconfiguration, resource integration, and scalability.These characteristics are presented as ways to preserve complementarity between radar and communication functions.
- Advantages: JRC can improve efficiency and reduce costs through hardware reuse, dual-function waveforms, lower energy use, and reduced equipment requirements.The paper also identifies benefits in system performance, spectrum usage, utilization, and complexity.
- Advantages: Integrated systems can let automobiles sense driving environments while exchanging vehicle information, and can improve reliability and information-gathering speed in reconnaissance.Military systems may additionally reduce facility volume, weight, and power consumption while improving information fusion.
III. JOINT RADAR AND COMMUNICATION APPLICATIONS
The paper surveys JRC applications across military and commercial domains, using representative scenarios to show where integrated sensing and communication can be applied.
- Application scope: JRC is presented as relevant to applications that require integrated sensing, information exchange, or multifunction operation.The listed application categories span platforms and networks rather than a single system type.
- Application scope: JRC applications are organized into military and commercial categories.The paper introduces representative military scenarios and then discusses commercial applications.
- Application scope: The survey uses naval electromagnetic systems, avionics systems, and group battling systems as military examples, alongside commercial scenarios.These examples frame both current benefits and future development opportunities for JRC.
3.1 Military Users
Military users face growing demands for interoperable electronic systems, reduced equipment burden, and rapid sensing and information exchange. JRC addresses these needs across naval, avionics, and unmanned-group scenarios.
- Military requirements: Future integrated battlefields require tanks, warplanes, and warships to carry diverse electronic devices for interoperability and survival.This creates a setting in which integrated RF functions are relevant to military platforms.
- Naval systems: Crowded warship environments create antenna congestion and electromagnetic interference or compatibility problems among separate RF systems.These constraints motivate integration solutions for shipborne combat systems.
- Naval systems: AMRFS and InTop pursued shared apertures and integrated RF architectures to reduce the number of apertures while increasing functionality and bandwidth.InTop also shared electronics, displays, and operators under common resource-allocation software.
- Avionics systems: Joint avionics design reduces airborne equipment and can lower aircraft radar cross section, pilot workload, and maintenance cost.PAVE PACE is identified as a joint avionics system used in the F-35 fighter.
- Unmanned groups: JRC can support unmanned group battle systems that require real-time environment sensing and rapid information interaction for mission success.Potential scenarios include UAV groups, tactical unmanned vehicle groups, and missile ad hoc networks.
- Unmanned groups: SSPARC-related work compares cooperative spectrum-access schemes and considers signal-to-noise maximization alongside co-channel-interference minimization.These efforts target spectrum sharing for inter-group communications.
3.2 Commercial Users
Commercial users of JRC include intelligent transportation, drone surveillance, and air traffic management. These applications combine sensing and communication to improve safety, support high-rate vehicular data, coordinate drone traffic, and simplify or integrate airborne surveillance and connectivity.
- Intelligent Transportation System: JRC supports intelligent transportation by improving communication reliability and extending radar detection through exchanged transportation information.Its motivations include transportation safety and increasing data demands from automated driving, 3D navigation maps, and interactive entertainment.
- Intelligent Transportation System: Automotive radar-communication systems target high data rates and integrated sensing for next-generation intelligent transportation platforms.Reported hardware directions include a 24 GHz single-transceiver platform, multifunctional transceivers, and low-resolution ADCs per RF chain.
- Intelligent Transportation System: A laboratory JARC test platform used an IEEE 802.11 OFDM waveform for forward collision warning and achieved 1 m single-target accuracy with 10 MHz bandwidth.The platform demonstrates measurement-based validation of integrated automotive radar and communication.
- Drone Surveillance Network: Drone surveillance radar networks address public-safety risks from hostile drones and support mobile, miniaturized, rapidly deployable detection and tracking.Their deployment is expected to expand for smart-city and drone-traffic-management needs, including within the U-Space framework.
- Drone Surveillance Network: Drone surveillance radars can simultaneously provide high-precision, high-resolution monitoring and exchange information with other radars through communication links.This integrated capability is identified as a future direction for drone traffic management.
- Air Traffic Management: Air traffic management is integrating sensing and communication as aviation modernization addresses navigation and connectivity for growing commercial aircraft fleets.ADS-B is presented as a candidate JRC surveillance technology, while communication signals and multifunction waveforms support passive or airborne radar implementations.
IV. STATE OF THE ART OF JRC
The survey organizes JRC research into coexistence, cooperation, co-design, and collaboration, tracing a progression from interference management and link-level integration toward mutual benefits among networked nodes.
- Organization: JRC state-of-the-art is categorized into coexistence, cooperation, co-design, and collaboration for comprehensive comparison.The fourth category, collaboration, extends the three categories proposed in earlier work.
- 4.1 Coexistence: Coexistence studies mutual interference, mitigation, and joint designs that satisfy radar SINR and communication-rate requirements.Approaches include precoder-decoder design, interference alignment, waveform estimation with data demodulation, time sharing, and MIMO-based spatial processing.
- 4.2 Cooperation: Cooperation uses shared system resources or dual-function frameworks, but high radar transmit power and weak radar echoes create cross-system hardware and reception challenges.Performance analyses also report gains in target localization bounds and mutual information from cooperation.
- 4.3 Co-design: Co-design develops compatible radar-communication waveforms using LFM, spread spectrum, CSS, MSK, and LFM-CPM techniques.These designs target orthogonality, jamming avoidance, and reduced performance loss in joint transmission.
- 4.3 Co-design: OFDM's high PAPR causes waveform distortion that can seriously reduce radar detection range, and continuous-wave operation requires difficult antenna isolation for self-interference reduction.These constraints are especially problematic for miniature antennas.
- 4.3 Co-design: MIMO and MIMO-OFDM can improve radar angle resolution and communication data rate simultaneously, while offering spatial freedom and interference-cancellation opportunities.MIMO radar also enlarges the virtual aperture and supports multi-beam operation; MIMO-OFDM provides multiple-path resistance and flexible system diversity.
- 4.4 Collaboration: Collaboration moves JRC beyond link-level integration by networking joint-function nodes to perform common tasks and enable mutual promotion.The survey discusses information-theoretic performance bounds and applications including cooperative multi-radar detection and multistatic cloud radar.
V. OPEN RESEARCH ISSUES
The paper identifies collaboration-oriented open issues spanning cooperative detection, radar-aided networking and beam alignment, resource sharing, information theory, cost, and scalability. These approaches use mutual radar–communication assistance to improve joint-system operation while addressing reliability, overhead, allocation complexity, and theoretical foundations.
- Overview: JRC collaboration research covers communication-aided multi-radar detection, radar-aided networking, channel estimation and beam alignment, resource sharing, multidimensional signal processing, and information theory.The paper also discusses costs and scalability as cross-cutting concerns.
- 5.1 Communication-aided Multi-radar Cooperative Detection: Cooperative detection remains constrained by the need to formulate and solve channel reliability for dependable multi-node data fusion.Beam sharing allocates power between radar detection and communication, and increasing the communication fraction reduces detection volume from the 1.6 × 10^9 m3 radar-only value.
- 5.2 Radar-aided Wireless Networking: Radar-aided networking uses node-distribution knowledge to design neighbor-discovery algorithms, with CRA-RPK reported as significantly reducing time slots compared with the previous CRA.The figure reports approximately 6-times faster neighbor discovery based on radar prior knowledge.
- 5.3 Radar-aided Channel Estimation and Beam Alignment: Radar-aided beam alignment searches the best beam pair and obtains direction-of-arrival information, reducing the overhead associated with frequent training-based beam sweeping.The approach is motivated by high-mobility scenarios requiring high data rates.
- 5.4 Joint Resource Sharing and 5.5 Improved Information Theory: The proposed resource-sharing pool organizes multidimensional resources for task and resource management, while future work calls for joint performance bounds, multidimensional processing, and unified information theory.Resource allocation becomes complex when time, spectrum, beam, storage, and calculation resources must be scheduled simultaneously.
- 5.6 Cost and Scalability Issues: JRC cost can decrease through shared antennas, dual-function waveforms, existing FPGA and MIMO components, and established waveform algorithms; scalability can benefit from fixed signaling bits, suitable protocols, 5G deployment, and steerable arrays.The paper identifies both hardware and software cost reductions and describes fixed bits as improving transmission performance without increasing system complexity.
VI. CONCLUSIONS
The paper surveys JRC concepts, applications, and four development stages—coexistence, cooperation, co-design, and collaboration. It proposes collaboration-based mutual benefits and identifies research directions spanning cooperative sensing, networking, beam alignment, resource sharing, information theory, cost, and scalability.
- Conclusions: The survey organizes JRC development into coexistence, cooperation, co-design, and collaboration, while reviewing applications and future opportunities.It frames joint radar–communication design as a potential direction for RF convergence systems.
- Conclusions: Collaboration is proposed as a new concept in which radar and communication operate with mutual benefits across multiple research directions.The identified directions include communication-aided multi-radar detection, radar-aided networking and beam alignment, resource sharing, and improved information theory.
- Conclusions: The conclusion highlights cost and scalability as additional issues for future JRC research.These issues are discussed alongside the proposed technical research orientations.