An Experimental Study of Radar-Centric Transmission for Integrated Sensing and Communications

This study proposes a dual-function radar and communication (DFRC) system that utilizes radar transmission parameters as modulation indexes to transmit data to the users while performing radar sensing as its primary function. The proposed technique exploits index modulation (IM) using the center frequency of radar chirps, their bandwidths, and polarization states as indexes to modulate the communication data within each radar chirp. By utilizing the combination of these indexes, the proposed DFRC system can reach up to 17 Mb/s throughput, while observing a robust radar performance. Through our experimental study, we also reveal the trade-off between the radar sensing performance and communication data rate, depending on the radar waveform parameters selected in the DFRC system. This study also demonstrates the implementation of the proposed DFRC system and presents its real-time over-the-air experimental measurements. Consequently, the simulation results are verified by real-time over-the-air experiments, where ARESTOR, a high-speed signal processing and experimental radar platform, has been employed.