Spread Spectrum Coded Radar for R2R Interference Mitigation in Autonomous Vehicles

Autonomous Vehicles (AVs) rely on a set of radar sensors operated on frequency modulated waveforms. Due to the large bandwidth requirement of frequency modulated radars, only a limited number of proximate vehicles can be allowed for a concurrent transmission within the available spectrum. However, with the explosive growth of AVs, the available spectrum may soon reach its capacity. As a results, the coexistence of multiple AVs working on same resource, may lead to the problem of Radar-to-Radar (R2R) interference, also known as radar blindness. In this paper, we propose the notion of coded waveforms to minimize the R2R interference among the vehicles operating on the same resource. Specifically, the spread spectrum codes have been used as another degree of freedom (i.e., along with time-frequency resources) to spread the inter-vehicular radar interference over the wider spectrum, which enable to orthogonalize more number of AVs over the available range of spectrum. In addition, we have formulated a Spread Spectrum-based Radar Transmission Scheme (SS-RTS), and described the transmission and reception through SS-RTS. Also, the SS-RTS has been compared with the existing Graph-based Resource Allocation (GRA) scheme. Further, simulation results verified that SS-RTS significantly reduces the inter-vehicular R2R interference and outperforms GRA in terms of blind probability.