Hardware-Software Platform Enabling Joint Communication and Radar Sensing at 25GHz with 1GHz Bandwidth

Joint Communication and Radar Sensing (JCAS) is predicted to be one of the compelling features of future 6G systems. This paper presents a hardware-software evaluation platform designed to analyze JCAS performance in scenarios where multi-purpose receiver (RX) front-end, antennas, and waveforms are utilized to support both communication and sensing functionalities. The measurements are conducted in the 5G NR n258 band with 1GHz bandwidth. The front-end is tunable in gain, linearity, and frequency and is supported by a wideband high-isolation co-located aperture coupled antenna. The RX front-end has a peak gain of 29.9 dB and achieves a maximum iP1dB of -17.5dBm for a gain of 16.8 dB. The antennas provide an isolation of more than 40 dB across the operating band. The software platform supports several types of waveforms and modulation standards enabling a comprehensive performance evaluation. The paper also presents the radar measurements in a multi-target scenario along with communication measurements.