Commodity automotive radars enable communication while sensing
RadarCom: Unlocking Simultaneous Communication and Sensing on Commodity Automotive mmWave Radars
Networking and Internet Architecture
Summary
Cars usually have radar sensors to detect nearby objects, but they don’t communicate through those radars. The authors found a way to let car radars talk to each other without changing any hardware or radio signals. They use interference between radars as a communication channel while still letting the radars detect objects safely. Their tests show it can send small data messages reliably while keeping good sensing performance.
What this means in practice
- •For automotive system developers: Integrate direct radar communication in vehicles without hardware change to improve V2V safety data sharing using existing radar sensors.$Commercial implications: Allows manufacturers and suppliers to offer radar modules that also handle communication, reducing the need for extra V2V communication hardware.
- •For traffic management teams: Utilize vehicles’ dual-purpose radars to gather communication and sensing data simultaneously for smarter traffic control and road safety interventions.
Authors
Yi Wei, Yue Zhang, Peijun Hou, Qiuyu Liao, Nan Cen
Abstract
Vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communication can improve road safety and traffic efficiency, yet its deployment remains limited by the need for dedicated communication hardware and supporting infrastructure. Meanwhile, production vehicles are already widely equipped with millimeter-wave radars for sensing. To unlock their communication potential, this paper presents RadarCom, a software-defined system that enables direct radar-to-radar communication on unmodified commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) automotive mmWave radars while preserving their native sensing functionality. The key insight is that mutual inter-radar interference, traditionally viewed as harmful, can be repurposed as a communication carrier. Based on this insight, RadarCom introduces slope-mismatch-based discovery, adaptive chirp synchronization, differential coding on range-FFT, and sensing-aware interference suppression to enable simultaneous communication and sensing without hardware modification, waveform redesign, or infrastructure support. We implement RadarCom on TI AWR2243 automotive radars and evaluate it under static, dynamic, and challenging real-world conditions. Results show an average effective data rate of 5.55 kbps with symbol error rates below 1.5%, while maintaining sensing F1 scores of up to 80.5% during concurrent communication. These results demonstrate the feasibility of transforming commodity automotive radars into dual-purpose communication and sensing devices.