Radar aided beam alignment in MmWave V2I communications supporting antenna diversity

Millimeter wave (mmWave) communication is the only viable approach for high bandwidth connected vehicles exchanging raw sensor data. A main challenge for mmWave in connected vehicles, is that it requires frequent link reconfiguration in mobile environments, which is a source of high overhead. In this paper we introduce the concept of radar aided mmWave vehicular communication. Side information derived from radar mounted on the infrastructure operating in a given mmWave band is used to adapt the beams of the vehicular communication system operating in another millimeter wave band. We propose a set of algorithms to perform the beam alignment task in a vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) scenario, from extracting information from the radar signal to configuring the beams that illuminate the different antennas in the vehicle. Simulation results confirm that radar can be a useful source of side information that helps configure the mmWave V2I link.