ECE-IISc-Distinguished Visitor Program (ECE-DVP)

Inaugural Talk

Title: Dual-Function Radar Communication System With Communication and Radar Performance Tradeoff

Speaker: Athina Petropulu

Professor, Rutgers University and

President, IEEE Signal Processing Society

Day/Date/Time: Monday, 16 Jan 2023, 4pm

Venue: Faculty Hall, Indian Institute of Science

Abstract: With today’s technology, radio frequency front-end architectures are very similar in radar and wireless communication systems. Further, in an effort to access more bandwidth, wireless systems have been shifting to frequency bands that have been traditionally occupied by radar systems. Given the hardware and frequency convergence, there is a lot of recent interest in the integration of the radar and communication functions in one system. Such integration will enable more efficient use of spectrum, reduce device size/cost and power consumption, and will also offer the potential for significant performance enhancement of both sensing and communication functions. Dual Function Radar-Communication (DFRC) systems is a class of integrated sensing-communication (ISC) systems that use the same waveform as well as the same hardware platform for both sensing and communication purposes. Thus, DFRC systems can achieve higher spectral efficiency than most ISC systems, require simpler transmitter hardware and a smaller, less expensive device. DFRC systems are prime candidates for autonomous driving vehicles, unmanned aerial vehicles, surveillance, search and rescue, and networked robots in advanced manufacturing applications that rely on censing and communications.

In the talk, we will present a novel DFRC system that uses the available bandwidth efficiently for both communication as well as sensing. The system transmits wideband, orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) waveforms and allows the transmit antennas to use subcarriers in a shared fashion. When all subcarriers are used in a shared fashion, the proposed system achieves high communication rate, while its sensing performance is limited by the size of the receive array. By reserving some subcarriers for exclusive use by transmit antennas (private subcarriers), the communication rate can be traded off for improved sensing performance. The improvement is achieved by using the private subcarriers to construct a large virtual array that yields higher resolution angle estimates. The system is endowed with beamforming capability, via waveform precoding, where the precoding matrix is optimally designed to meet a joint sensing-communication system performance metric. We also present novel hybrid analog-digital architectures for achieving good performance with reduced hardware and energy cost via the use of double-phase shifters.

Speaker Profile: Athina P. Petropulu is Distinguished Professor at the Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) Department at Rutgers, having served as chair of the department during 2010-2016. Prior to joining Rutgers she was a Professor of ECE at Drexel University (1992-2010). She held Visiting Scholar appointments at SUPELEC, Universite’ Paris Sud, Princeton University and University of Southern California. Dr. Petropulu’s research interests span the area of statistical signal processing, wireless communications, signal processing in networking, physical layer security, and radar signal processing. Her research has been funded by various government industry sponsors including the National Science Foundation (NSF), the Office of Naval research, the US Army, the National Institute of Health, the Whitaker Foundation, Lockheed Martin and Raytheon. Dr. Petropulu is Fellow of IEEE and the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), and recipient of the 1995 Presidential Faculty Fellow Award given by NSF and the White House. She is 2022 President of the IEEE Signal Processing Society (SPS) and 2020 President-Elect of IEEE SPS. She has served as Editor-in-Chief of the IEEE Transactions on Signal Processing (2009-2011) and IEEE Signal Processing Society Vice President-Conferences (2006-2008). She was General Chair of 2020 and 2021 IEEE SPS PROGRESS Workshops, General Co-Chair of the 2018 IEEE International Workshop on Signal Processing Advances in Wireless Communications (SPAWC), Kalamata Greece, and General Chair of the 2005 International Conference on Acoustics Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP-05), Philadelphia PA. She was Distinguished Lecturer for the Signal Processing Society for 2017-2018, and is currently Distinguished Lecturer for the IEEE Aerospace & Electronics Systems Society. She is recipient of the 2012 IEEE Signal Processing Society Meritorious Service Award, and co-recipient of the 2005 IEEE Signal Processing Magazine Best Paper Award, the 2020 IEEE Signal Processing Society Young Author Best Paper Award (B. Li), the 2021 IEEE Signal Processing Society Young Author Best Paper Award (F. Liu), the 2021 Barry Carlton Best Paper Award by IEEE Aerospace and Electronic Systems Society, and the 2022 IEEE Sensor Array and Multichannel Signal Processing Workshop Best Student paper Award (Y. Li).

Generously supported by

Alumna Nirmala Jay Pullur

(M.E. (Electrical Communication Engineering) – 1996)