Joint Radar and Communication Design: Applications, State-of-the-Art, and the Road Ahead

Sharing of the frequency bands between radar and communication systems has attracted substantial attention, as it can avoid under-utilization of otherwise permanently allocated spectral resources, thus improving efficiency.Further, there is increasing demand for radar and communication systems that share the hardware platform as well as the frequency band, as this not only decongests the spectrum, but also benefits both sensing and signaling operations via the full cooperation between both functionalities.Nevertheless, its success critically hinges on high-quality joint radar and communication designs.In the first part of this paper, we overview the research progress in the areas of radar-communication coexistence and dual-functional radar-communication (DFRC) systems, with particular emphasis on the application scenarios and the technical approaches.In the second part, we propose a novel transceiver architecture and frame structure for a DFRC base station (BS) operating in the millimeter wave (mmWave) band, using the hybrid analogdigital (HAD) beamforming technique.We assume that the BS is serving a multi-antenna user equipment (UE) over a mmWave channel, and at the same time it actively detects targets.The targets also play the role of scatterers for the communication signal.In that framework, we propose a novel scheme for joint target search and communication channel estimation relying on omni-directional pilot signals generated by the HAD structure.Given a fully-digital communication precoder and a desired radar transmit beampattern, we propose to design the analog and digital precoders under non-convex constant-modulus (CM) and power constraints, such that the BS can formulate narrow beams towards all the targets, while pre-equalizing the impact of the communication channel.Furthermore, we design a HAD receiver that can simultaneously process signals from the UE and echo waves from the targets.By tracking the angular variation of