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

我们希望在这个项目中解决的主要技术挑战是设计移动接入段和有效的毫米波感知机制，同时处理高方向性和高移动性。我们强调，这是支持未来汽车/移动应用的不可避免的需要，如前所述，现有的通信技术无法满足这一需求。我们方法的核心技术思想是将传感和通信相结合，即利用雷达(和可能的其他形式)传感，以便为快速波束捕获和跟踪、拓扑感知、位置感知提供“辅助信息”，从而实现主动切换、宏分集和快速用户-BS关联。同时，我们也将从相反的方向来研究感知和通信之间的协同作用：即通信辅助的感知。例如，当目标是也可以通信和协作的对象时，则可以通过将雷达传感与通信协议相结合来增强典型的雷达检测功能。这使得这个项目中研究的问题与标准的雷达问题有根本的不同，在标准的雷达问题中，目标是不合作的，可能是敌对的(例如，在军事应用中)。

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).