Description
In recent years, the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) have moved to mandate standardization of vehicle collision avoidance technology. As consequence, it may soon be required of all vehicle manufacturers to include radar-driven sensing technology (such as automatic emergency breaking) and vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communication systems as standard safety features. V2V relies on an amendment of the IEEE 802.11 WiFi standard, which is a highly developed and mature technology. By contrast, radar is relatively new to the consumer space and comes with increased hardware complexity and design costs and requires substantial amounts of bandwidth to operate. In an effort to offer a more spectrally compact and economically viable solution, there has been growing research into the field of WiFi radar signal processing algorithms to enable a dual radar-communication link. Combining these two features would enable cost savings to vehicle manufacturers by lowering design complexity while also saving precious radio frequency spectrum. This thesis provides a survey on the topics of radar sensing, Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) modem architecture, and the application of the Estimation of Signal Parameters via Rotational Variance Technique (ESPRIT) algorithm to aggregated IEEE 802.11p WiFi packets to extract range and Doppler information. A 5MHz OFDM modem that adheres closely to the 802.11p PHY was implemented on two Universal Software Defined Peripherals (USRP) via MATLAB’s USRP toolbox. By applying ESPRIT-driven radar processing algorithms to a collection of received WiFi symbols, real time Doppler radar was achieved which demonstrated an average accuracy of sub 0.64m/s in measuring a vehicle’s velocity.
