Adaptive Scheduling for Joint Communication and Radar Detection: Tradeoff Among Throughput, Delay, and Detection Performance

In this paper, we focus on the tradeoff design between communication and radar detection for a joint communication and radar (CommRadar) system by leveraging a low-complexity hardware architecture. To achieve this, we exploit the communication traffic diversity to design an adaptive scheduling policy. Through adjusting the CommRadar mode selection, radar steering direction and communication user scheduling, and time allocation between communication and radar detection, we could better utilize the un-occupied transmission time to improve radar detection performance when the data traffic is light, and balance the time allocation between communication and radar detection when the data traffic is heavy. Moreover, for our adaptive scheduling method, we have provided a quantitative performance bound for data throughput, queueing delay, and radar detection performance of both short-term and long-term. By conducting extensive simulation studies, we have demonstrated that our method could greatly reduce the communication performance loss when integrating the radar functionality, while still guaranteeing radar detection performance.