Joint radar-communication waveform designs using signals from multiplexed users

Joint radar-communication designs are exploited in applications where radar and communications systems share the same frequency band or when both radar sensing and information communication functions are required in the same system. Finding a waveform that is suitable for both radar and communication is challenging due to the difference between radar and communication operations. In this paper, we propose a new method of designing dual-functional waveforms for both radar and communication using signals from multiplexed communications users. Specifically, signals from different communications users multiplexed in the time, code or frequency domains across different data bits are linearly combined to generate an overall radar waveform. Three typical radar waveforms are considered. The coefficients of the linear combination are optimized to minimize the mean squared error with or without a constraint on the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) for the communications signals. Numerical results show that the optimization without SNR constraint can almost perfectly approximate the radar waveform in all the cases considered, giving good dual-functional waveforms for both radar and communication. Also, among different multiplexing techniques, time division multiple access is the best option to approximate the radar waveform, followed by code division multiple access and orthogonal frequency division multiple access

Cooperative Radar and Communications Signaling: The Estimation and Information Theory Odd Couple

We investigate cooperative radar and communications signaling. While each system typically considers the other system a source of interference, by considering the radar and communications operations to be a single joint system, the performance of both systems can, under certain conditions, be improved by the existence of the other. As an initial demonstration, we focus on the radar as relay scenario and present an approach denoted multiuser detection radar (MUDR). A novel joint estimation and information theoretic bound formulation is constructed for a receiver that observes communications and radar return in the same frequency allocation. The joint performance bound is presented in terms of the communication rate and the estimation rate of the system.Comment: 6 pages, 2 figures, to be presented at 2014 IEEE Radar Conferenc

Overlapped-MIMO Radar Waveform Design for Coexistence With Communication Systems

This paper explores an overlapped-multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) antenna architecture and a spectrum sharing algorithm via null space projection (NSP) for radar-communications coexistence. In the overlapped-MIMO architecture, the transmit array of a collocated MIMO radar is partitioned into a number of subarrays that are allowed to overlap. Each of the antenna elements in these subarrays have signals orthogonal to each other and to the elements of the other subarrays. The proposed architecture not only improves sidelobe suppression to reduce interference to communications system, but also enjoys the advantages of MIMO radar without sacrificing the main desirable characteristics. The radar-centric spectrum sharing algorithm then projects the radar signal onto the null space of the communications system's interference channel, which helps to avoid interference from the radar. Numerical results are presented which show the performance of the proposed waveform design algorithm in terms of overall beampattern and sidelobe levels of the radar waveform and finally shows a comparison of the proposed system with existing collocated MIMO radar architectures.Comment: accepted at IEEE WCN

A Utility Proportional Fairness Resource Allocation in Spectrally Radar-Coexistent Cellular Networks

Spectrum sharing is an elegant solution to addressing the scarcity of the bandwidth for wireless communications systems. This research studies the feasibility of sharing the spectrum between sectorized cellular systems and stationary radars interfering with certain sectors of the communications infrastructure. It also explores allocating optimal resources to mobile devices in order to provide with the quality of service for all running applications whilst growing the communications network spectrally coexistent with the radar systems. The rate allocation problem is formulated as two convex optimizations, where the radar-interfering sector assignments are extracted from the portion of the spectrum non-overlapping with the radar operating frequency. Such a double-stage resource allocation procedure inherits the fairness into the rate allocation scheme by first assigning the spectrally radar-overlapping resources

Joint bi-static radar and communications designs for intelligent transportation

The cooperation of radar and communications becomes important in vehicular environments due to the demand for radar-assisted communications or communications-assisted radar. In this paper, the tradeoff between bi-static radar and communications in a joint radar-communications setting is studied. We propose three schemes by using time division, superposition or their mixture. For each scheme, three optimization problems are formulated to maximize either the probability of detection for radar subject to a minimum communications rate, the communications rate subject to a minimum probability of detection for radar, or a combined measure of tradeoff. Specifically, given a fixed amount of total time or power for both communications and radar, the optimal power allocation and/or time allocation between radar and communications are derived. Numerical results show that the superposition scheme outperforms the time division scheme and the mixture scheme with considerable performance gains. They also show that the surveillance channel in radar and the communications channel are more important than the direct channel in radar

Fundamental Limits on Performance for Cooperative Radar-Communications Coexistence

abstract: Spectral congestion is quickly becoming a problem for the telecommunications sector. In order to alleviate spectral congestion and achieve electromagnetic radio frequency (RF) convergence, communications and radar systems are increasingly encouraged to share bandwidth. In direct opposition to the traditional spectrum sharing approach between radar and communications systems of complete isolation (temporal, spectral or spatial), both systems can be jointly co-designed from the ground up to maximize their joint performance for mutual benefit. In order to properly characterize and understand cooperative spectrum sharing between radar and communications systems, the fundamental limits on performance of a cooperative radar-communications system are investigated. To facilitate this investigation, performance metrics are chosen in this dissertation that allow radar and communications to be compared on the same scale. To that effect, information is chosen as the performance metric and an information theoretic radar performance metric compatible with the communications data rate, the radar estimation rate, is developed. The estimation rate measures the amount of information learned by illuminating a target. With the development of the estimation rate, standard multi-user communications performance bounds are extended with joint radar-communications users to produce bounds on the performance of a joint radar-communications system. System performance for variations of the standard spectrum sharing problem defined in this dissertation are investigated, and inner bounds on performance are extended to account for the effect of continuous radar waveform optimization, multiple radar targets, clutter, phase noise, and radar detection. A detailed interpretation of the estimation rate and a brief discussion on how to use these performance bounds to select an optimal operating point and achieve RF convergence are provided.Dissertation/ThesisDoctoral Dissertation Electrical Engineering 201

MU-MIMO Communications with MIMO Radar: From Co-existence to Joint Transmission

Beamforming techniques are proposed for a joint multi-input-multi-output (MIMO) radar-communication (RadCom) system, where a single device acts both as a radar and a communication base station (BS) by simultaneously communicating with downlink users and detecting radar targets. Two operational options are considered, where we first split the antennas into two groups, one for radar and the other for communication. Under this deployment, the radar signal is designed to fall into the null-space of the downlink channel. The communication beamformer is optimized such that the beampattern obtained matches the radar's beampattern while satisfying the communication performance requirements. To reduce the optimizations' constraints, we consider a second operational option, where all the antennas transmit a joint waveform that is shared by both radar and communications. In this case, we formulate an appropriate probing beampattern, while guaranteeing the performance of the downlink communications. By incorporating the SINR constraints into objective functions as penalty terms, we further simplify the original beamforming designs to weighted optimizations, and solve them by efficient manifold algorithms. Numerical results show that the shared deployment outperforms the separated case significantly, and the proposed weighted optimizations achieve a similar performance to the original optimizations, despite their significantly lower computational complexity.Comment: 15 pages, 15 figures. This work has been submitted to the IEEE for possible publication. Copyright may be transferred without notice, after which this version may no longer be accessibl

Deployable antenna demonstration project

Test program options are described for large lightweight deployable antennas for space communications, radar and radiometry systems