□ A research team led by Senior Researcher Bongseok Kim of the Future Mobility Research Division at DGIST (President Kunwoo Lee) has developed a "low-complexity receiver technology" that can simultaneously perform data communication and detect surrounding objects using automotive radar.
□ In the fields of autonomous vehicles and connected cars, "Integrated Sensing and Communication (ISAC)"—a next-generation mobility technology that enables vehicles to detect (sensing) their surroundings while simultaneously exchanging information (communication) with other vehicles or road infrastructure—is essential. However, conventional approaches require multiple signal processing units as the amount of data to be transmitted increases, making the system more complex and dramatically increasing the computational burden.
□ The team led by Senior Researcher Bongseok Kim achieved a breakthrough in addressing this challenge by applying the "Fractional Fourier Transform (FRFT)"—a mathematical technique for precisely analyzing complex signals whose frequency changes over time—to automotive radar receive signals. The team devised a method that concentrates dispersed signal energy into a single point, enabling more efficient data extraction. Consequently, communication information can be identified quickly and accurately using only a single receiver processing structure, without requiring a complex arrangement of multiple signal processing units.
□ The research team conducted experiments by simulating a 77 GHz automotive radar environment involving high-speed driving at 240 km/h and complex radio wave reflection conditions. The results showed that the proposed technology delivered significantly more stable communication performance than conventional approaches while simultaneously improving both target range measurement and detection performance by compensating for radar signal spreading.
□ In particular, even under adverse conditions of moving at high speed in environments with severe multipath propagation, the technology measured distances with an error of less than 1m and achieved a target detection rate approaching 100% when a sufficient signal level was secured. Above all, because it can be applied without substantially modifying the hardware structure of existing automotive radar systems, the technology is expected to be widely applied across various fields, such as autonomous vehicles, connected cars, drones, and unmanned vehicles.
□ "This study presents a core technology that simultaneously performs communication and surrounding environment detection perfectly with a single automotive radar while also substantially reducing the receiver's data processing burden," said Senior Researcher Bongseok Kim of the Future Mobility Research Division at DGIST. "We expect it to significantly contribute to advancing next-generation autonomous driving and intelligent transportation systems."
□ □ Meanwhile, this study was conducted with support from DGIST's institutional research program and the Ministry of Science and ICT and the National Research Foundation of Korea's Basic Research Project (Outstanding Research). Senior Researcher Bongseok Kim of the Future Mobility Research Division at DGIST served as the first author, and Principal Researcher Sangdong Kim served as the corresponding author. The research findings were published online in July in IEEE Wireless Communications Letters, an internationally renowned journal in the field of wireless communications.
