A study on UWB radar assisted by inter-vehicle communication for safety applications

UWB(Ultra Wide Band) is the communication scheme that information is transmitted using very wide frequency band width beyond several GHz. Due to the use of an impulsive signal to achieve very wide bandwidth transmission in UWB, it is also possible to achieve high precision ranging and positioning. Therefore, application of UWB is widely researched in ITS radars, indoor ranging and positioning, etc. One of the important applications of UWB in ITS is an on-board radar for safety driving to avoid incident in advance. In UWB radar, each vehicle transmits UWB signal and waits for the reflected wave from the target vehicle and the round trip time of the transmitted signal is measured to obtain the distance against the target vehicle. In this process, the distance and relative velocity against the target vehicle can be derived. In this paper, the UWB radar system assisted by communication is proposed in order to improve safety by obtaining additional information of the target vehicle by communication. Moreover, by combining communication with the UWB radar, it is possible to improve precision of ranging against the distant vehicles. The basic characteristics are examined by computer simulation.