OFDM joint communication–radar with leaky-wave antennas

In this Letter, the authors report on a 26 GHz joint communication–radar system. By exploiting the beam steering features of leaky-wave antennas, angle-of-arrival estimation and multi-user transmission are achieved. Furthermore, the Zadoff–Chu preamble of the OFDM waveform is used to provide a frequency-modulated continuous-wave radar signal. This way, the wide operational bandwidth is used for both, communications and radar, yielding high data throughput and precise user localisation. Experimentally, spectral-efficient 16-QAM multi-user 5 × 4 Gbit/s communications and user localisation with an accuracy of about 2 cm and ±1.5° is demonstrated.