Adaptive Scheduling for Joint CommRadar: Optimizing Tradeoff Among Data Throughput, Queueing Delay, and Detection Opportunities

In this paper, we focus on the performance tradeoff optimization problem between communication and radar in a time-division joint CommRadar system, and this promises a low-complexity hardware architecture. We ensure the communication performance in terms of time averaged data throughput and queueing delay. We guarantee radar detection opportunities in two aspects: 1) ensuring the detection performance (maximum detection range and velocity, velocity resolution) for each detection, and 2) maintaining the minimal time averaged detection chance over long term. To achieve this, we explore the communication traffic diversity to design an adaptive scheduling policy. We optimize the CommRadar mode selection, utilize the un-occupied transmission time for increasing radar detection opportunities when the data traffic is light, and balance the time allocation between communication and radar while the data traffic is heavy. We provide a quantitative performance bound for data throughput, queueing delay, and detection opportunities for our adaptive scheduling method. We verify the performance of our method through simulation. Extensive simulation results demonstrate that our method could greatly reduce the communication performance loss after integrating the radar functionality, while guaranteeing radar detection opportunities.