Performance characterization of joint communication and sensing with beyond 5G NR-V2X sidelink

Joint communication and sensing allows to share frequency spectrum, hardware, and signal processing blocks between communication and sensing, providing new radar functionalities through the exploitation of communication signals. This is becoming an important trend also in vehicular communications, where future standardized technologies for connected vehicles can be used to detect targets nearby without overloading the already scarce spectrum with dedicated radar signals. Objective of this paper is to characterize the performance of 5G new radio (NR) vehicle-to-everything (V2X) sidelink, in terms of lower bounds for sensing purposes; specifically, we evaluate the impact of physical and radio access communication parameters on the sensing performance in terms of detection capability and parameter estimation quality. As a result, it is shown how the effect of the presence of multiple vehicles in the scenario, and the inherent resource allocation policies, have a non-negligible impact on the communication and sensing performance. In particular, it is shown that when considering the interference of multiple vehicles, the influence on sensing performance of the chosen radio parameters, such as bandwidth, modulation and coding scheme, and packet size is different compared to the inference free case.