JSTSP Volume 15 Issue 6

Dual-Functional Radar-Communication (DFRC) is a promising paradigm to achieve Integrated Sensing and Communication (ISAC) in beyond 5G. In parallel, Rate-Splitting Multiple Access (RSMA), relying on multi-antenna Rate-Splitting (RS) by splitting messages into common and private streams at the transmitter and Successive Interference Cancellation (SIC) at the receivers, has emerged as a new strategy for multi-user multi-antenna communications systems. I

Dual-functional radar-communication (DFRC) systems can simultaneously perform both radar and communication functionalities using the same hardware platform and spectrum resource. In this paper, we consider multi-input multi-output (MIMO) DFRC systems and focus on transmit beamforming designs to provide both radar sensing and multi-user communications.

Joint communication and radar sensing (JCR) represents an emerging research field aiming to integrate the above two functionalities into a single system, by sharing the majority of hardware, signal processing modules and, in a typical case, the transmitted signal. The close cooperation of the communication and sensing functions can enable significant improvement of spectrum efficiency, reduction of device size, cost and power consumption, and improvement of performance of both functions. 

The papers in this special section focuses on the exploitation of the radar spectrum for use of commercial wireless communication, as well as emerging applications requiring joint communication and sensing designs. The integration of radar and communication systems has recently attracted a lot of research and commercial interest. The emergence of spectrum-hungry applications have necessitated the exploitation of the permanently allocated, but potentially under-utilized spectral resources, and sharing the frequency bands between radar and communication systems has attracted substantial attention.