Estimation of Detection Performance for Vehicle FMCW Radars Using EM Simulations

Abstract

This paper proposes a systematic method for estimating detection performances of a frequency-modulated continuous wave radar using electromagnetic simulations. The proposed systematic method includes a radar system simulator that can obtain range-Doppler images using the electromagnetic (EM) simulations in conjunction with a test setup employed for performance evaluation of multiple targets at different velocities in a traffic environment. This method is then applied for optimizing the half-power beamwidths of the antenna array using an evaluation metric defined to improve the detection strengths for the multiple targets. The optimized antenna has vertical and horizontal half-power beam widths of 10 and 60, respectively. The results confirm that that the proposed systematic method is suitable to improve the radar detection performance with the enhanced radar-Doppler images.