Automotive Radar Interference Characterization: FMCW or PMCW?

In this paper, we characterize the effect of radar-to-radar interference in a system setting in terms of the probability of missed detection for two common driving scenarios: Highway traffic and a 4-way intersection. We focus on the frequency modulated continuous wave (FMCW) and phase modulated continuous wave (PMCW) radar waveforms and try to answer the question: Is one waveform inherently better than the other for automotive applications? In contrast to most results available in published literature, we show that PMCW does not have an advantage over FMCW in a system setting. For the scenarios considered in this paper, our results show that a typical FMCW radar unit actually outperforms a typical PMCW radar unit in terms of the probability of missed detection by using coordination across the radar network.