Hardware Software Co-Design Based Reconfigurable Radar Signal Processing Accelerator for Joint Radar-Communication System

Millimeter wave (mmW) codesigned 802.11ad-based joint radar communication (JRC) systems have been identified as a potential solution for realizing high bandwidth connected vehicles for next-generation intelligent transportation systems. The radar functionality within the JRC enables accurate detection and localization of mobile targets, which can significantly speed up the selection of the optimal high-directional narrow beam required for mmW communications between the base station and mobile target. To bring JRC to reality, a radar signal processing (RSP) accelerator, co-located with the wireless communication physical layer (PHY), on edge platforms is desired. In this work, we discuss the three-dimensional digital hardware RSP framework for 802.11ad-based JRC to detect the range, azimuth, and Doppler velocity of multiple targets. We present a novel efficient reconfigurable architecture for RSP on multi-processor system-on-chip (MPSoC) via hardware-software co-design, word-length optimization, and serial-parallel configurations. We demonstrate the functional correctness of the proposed fixed-point architecture and significant savings in resource utilization (~40-70), execution time (1.5x improvement), and power consumption (50%) over floating-point architecture. The acceleration on hardware offers a 120-factor improvement in execution time over the benchmark Quad-core processor. The proposed architecture enables on-the-fly reconfigurability to support different azimuth precision and Doppler velocity resolution, offering a real-time trade-off between functional accuracy and detection time. We demonstrate end-to-end RSP on MPSoC with a user-friendly graphical user interface (GUI).