Joint wireless communication and radar sensing: review and future prospects

Electronic information systems, such as wireless communication and radar sensors, have extensively contributed to a diverse range applications in the recent past. For the next generation of top-level electronic information systems, the fusion of wireless communication and radar sensing is becoming increasingly crucial. The fusion concept would definitely bring up many benefits including architecture unification and simplification, functional reconfiguration and especially efficiency enhancement and cost reduction. In this paper, the inherent essence and potential advantages of joint wireless communication and radar sensing systems are thoughtfully analyzed. Following which, the historical development and current state-of-the-art are reviewed and discussed. The bottlenecks for the realization of the joint concept are theoretical analyzed. To showcase the current research advances, the multi-dimensional waveforms are introduced with emphasis on several proposed research contributions in this emerging area. Finally, the development trend of the joint concept is prospected. Through our analysis, we aim to open up a new perspective of using multi-dimensional waveforms to realize the joint wireless communication and radar sensing concept.