Vehicular RF Convergence: Simultaneous Radar, Communications, and PNT for Urban Air Mobility and Automotive Applications

Modern RF environments are becoming increasingly congested. This limits the opportunities and capabilities of modern RF systems, obstructing the development and proliferation of new technologies. Novel vehicular RF technologies promise a new era of transportation capabilities, but legacy design techniques cannot adapt to the current spectral congestion. We summarize recent RF Convergence results and discuss how they mitigate spectral congestion in modern vehicular applications. We propose a joint radar, communications, positioning, navigation, and timing (JRCPNT) system architecture as a suitable candidate for future automotive applications. We present relevant performance bounds and initial experimental results to demonstrate the potential performance enhancements of such multiple-function RF systems. We define multiple-channel, multiple-user receiver (MCMUR) techniques that enable this architecture and discuss how these components cooperate to enable these performance enhancements. We summarize initial experimental results to demonstrate the viability of such multiple-function architectures in the context of urban air mobility (UAM) and other automotive applications.