A new automotive radar technology developed by researchers at the Daegu Gyeongbuk Institute of Science and Technology (DGIST) could allow vehicles to communicate with one another and detect their surroundings using a single, significantly less complex receiver architecture. The approach addresses one of the central challenges facing next-generation autonomous vehicles: how to combine high-speed wireless communication with precise environmental sensing without forcing vehicles to carry increasingly complicated signal-processing hardware.
The technology is designed for integrated sensing and communication, or ISAC, a field that aims to make the same radio signals useful for two purposes at once. In an ISAC-enabled vehicle, radar signals can measure the distance and movement of surrounding objects while also carrying information exchanged with nearby vehicles, roadside infrastructure, or other connected systems. This could help autonomous cars coordinate maneuvers, share warnings, and build a more complete picture of traffic conditions. Yet as communication data rates rise, conventional ISAC receivers often require multiple processing chains, increasing power consumption, hardware complexity, and the computational workload placed on onboard systems.
A research team led by Senior Researcher Bongseok Kim of DGIST’s Future Mobility Research Division has proposed a way to simplify that architecture by processing automotive radar signals with a mathematical tool known as the Fractional Fourier Transform, or FRFT. Unlike the conventional Fourier Transform, which primarily describes the frequency content of a signal, the FRFT is particularly useful for analyzing signals whose frequency changes over time. That makes it well suited to modern radar waveforms, including frequency-modulated chirps whose instantaneous frequency sweeps across a bandwidth as they travel toward targets and return to the vehicle.
The researchers applied the FRFT directly to the beat signals generated by automotive radar. A beat signal is produced when a transmitted radar waveform is compared with its returning echo. The resulting frequency difference contains information about the target’s range and, when the target or vehicle is moving, its relative motion. In practical radar systems, however, signal energy can become dispersed because of motion, propagation effects, modulation, and reflections from multiple surfaces. The team’s method uses the FRFT to concentrate that spread energy into a more distinct point in the signal domain, making the embedded communication information easier to identify and process.
This concentration effect is central to the proposed low-complexity receiver. Rather than distributing incoming data across several specialized signal-processing units, the system can extract communication information through a single receiver processing structure. The result is a streamlined architecture capable of handling sensing and communication together without requiring major changes to the underlying radar hardware. For vehicle manufacturers, that compatibility could be important: a technology that can be incorporated into existing 77-gigahertz radar platforms may be easier to deploy than a system requiring an entirely new sensor suite.
To evaluate the approach, the DGIST team simulated a 77-gigahertz automotive radar environment under demanding conditions. The experiments included vehicle speeds reaching 240 kilometers per hour, along with complex radio-wave reflection scenarios that can produce multipath propagation. Multipath occurs when signals reach the receiver through several routes after bouncing off vehicles, road surfaces, buildings, or other objects. These delayed and distorted copies can interfere with one another, making it more difficult for a receiver to recover communication data and for a radar to determine the true position of a target.
According to the reported results, the FRFT-based receiver maintained more stable communication performance than conventional approaches while also improving radar sensing. The processing method compensated for the spreading of radar signals, strengthening both range estimation and target detection. Under severe multipath conditions and high-speed motion, the system measured distances with an error of less than one meter. When the received signal level was sufficient, the reported target detection rate approached 100 percent. These results suggest that the same mathematical operation used to simplify communication decoding may also help restore information needed for accurate radar perception.
The implications extend beyond passenger cars. A compact ISAC receiver could support connected vehicles that exchange information about hazards, traffic flow, braking, or road conditions while continuously monitoring their surroundings. Similar principles could be useful in drones, delivery robots, unmanned ground vehicles, and other platforms where size, weight, power consumption, and processing capacity are tightly constrained. By reducing the number of receiver chains, the approach may lower implementation costs and make advanced sensing-and-communication functions more accessible to systems that cannot accommodate large or power-hungry computing platforms.
The researchers emphasize that the technology is intended to reduce processing complexity without sacrificing the dual role of automotive radar. “This study presents a core technology that simultaneously performs communication and surrounding environment detection with a single automotive radar while also substantially reducing the receiver’s data processing burden,” said Bongseok Kim of DGIST’s Future Mobility Research Division. The work was carried out with support from DGIST’s institutional research program, the Ministry of Science and ICT, and the National Research Foundation of Korea’s Basic Research Project for Outstanding Research. Kim served as the first author, while Principal Researcher Sangdong Kim was the corresponding author. The findings were published online in July in IEEE Wireless Communications Letters under the title “Low-Complexity Single-Chain ISAC Receiver via Beat-Signal Domain FRFT.”
Subject of Research: Integrated sensing and communication technology for automotive radar, autonomous vehicles, and connected mobility
Article Title: Low-Complexity Single-Chain ISAC Receiver via Beat-Signal Domain FRFT
Web References: https://doi.org/10.1109/LWC.2026.3716020
References: IEEE Wireless Communications Letters; DOI: 10.1109/LWC.2026.3716020
Image Credits: Conceptual Diagram of an Integrated Sensing Communication System Between Vehicles
Keywords
Automotive radar, integrated sensing and communication, ISAC, Fractional Fourier Transform, FRFT, autonomous vehicles, connected cars, radar sensing, wireless communication, multipath propagation, 77 GHz radar, mobility technology, drones, unmanned vehicles
