SENCOM: SENsing and COmmunication in Networks with High Mobility and High Directivity

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The main technical challenge that we wish to tackle in this project is to design the mobile access segment and efficient sensing mechanisms at mmWaves, handling both high directivity and high mobility. We stress the fact that this is an unavoidable need to support future automotive/mobility applications, as argued before and cannot be handled by existing communication techniques. The key technical idea at the centre of our approach is to combine sensing and communication, that is, take advantage of radar (and possible other forms of) sensing, in order to provide “side information” for fast beam acquisition and tracking, topology awareness, location awareness, in order to enable proactive handover, macro-diversity, and fast user-BS association. At the same time, we shall investigate the synergy between sensing and communication also in the reverse direction: i.e., communication-aided sensing. For example, when the target is an object that can also communicate and cooperate, then the typical radar detection functions can be enhanced by combining radar sensing with the communication protocol. This makes the problems investigated in this project fundamentally different from the standard radar problems, where targets are non-cooperative and perhaps hostile (e.g., as in military applications).