Interference avoidance and cancellation in automotive OFDM radar networks

With increasing use of millimeter-wave radars in driving safety applications, interference between vehicles becomes a significant issue. Moreover, oscillator imperfections and relative velocity effects induce inter-carrier interference (ICI) owing to frequency offset, leading to degradation of target detection. In this paper, time-frequency resources are divided into several orthogonal logical channels according to the time-frequency division (TFD) scheme. We propose a two-stage interference mitigation method. First, an interference avoidance technique is designed for each piece of radar equipment (RE) to select logical channels with the least ICI. Then, each RE reconstructs and cancels interference according to estimated parameters based on the proposed interference cancellation technique. Computer simulations reveal that the proposed interference avoidance technique can approximately achieve the performance of ground truth, especially when the number of interferers is small. In addition, noise enhancement effects can be effectively mitigated through the proposed cancellation technique.