Hardware-Software Platform Enabling Joint Communication and Radar Sensing at 25 GHz with 1 GHz Bandwidth

Joint Communication and Radar Sensing (JCAS) is predicted to be one of the compelling features of future 6 G systems. This paper presents a hardware-software evaluation platform designed to analyze JCAS performance in scenarios where multi-purpose receiver (RX) front-end, antennas, and waveforms are utilized to support both communication and sensing functionalities. The measurements are conducted in the 5G NR n258 band with 1 GHz bandwidth. The front-end is tunable in gain, linearity, and frequency and is supported by a wideband high-isolation co-located aperture coupled antenna. The RX front-end has a peak gain of 29.9 dB and achieves a maximum <tex xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">$i \mathbf{P}_{1\text{dB}}$</tex> of −17.5 dBm for a gain of 16.8 dB. The antennas provide an isolation of more than 40 dB across the operating band. The software platform supports several types of waveforms and modulation standards enabling a comprehensive performance evaluation. The paper also presents the radar measurements in a multi-target scenario along with communication measurements.