Joint Design of Overlaid Communication Systems and Pulsed Radars

The focus of this paper is on co-existence between a communication system and a pulsed radar sharing the same bandwidth. Based on the fact that the interference generated by the radar onto the communication receiver is intermittent and depends on the density of scattering objects (such as, e.g., targets), we first show that the communication system is equivalent to a set of independent parallel channels, whereby pre-coding on each channel can be introduced as a new degree of freedom. We introduce a new figure of merit, named the {\em compound rate}, which is a convex combination of rates with and without interference, to be optimized under constraints concerning the signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (including {\em signal-dependent} interference due to clutter) experienced by the radar and obviously the powers emitted by the two systems: the degrees of freedom are the radar waveform and the afore-mentioned encoding matrix for the communication symbols. We provide closed-form solutions for the optimum transmit policies for both systems under two basic models for the scattering produced by the radar onto the communication receiver, and account for possible correlation of the signal-independent fraction of the interference impinging on the radar. We also discuss the region of the achievable communication rates with and without interference. A thorough performance assessment shows the potentials and the limitations of the proposed co-existing architecture

Adaptive Interference Removal for Un-coordinated Radar/Communication Co-existence

Most existing approaches to co-existing communication/radar systems assume that the radar and communication systems are coordinated, i.e., they share information, such as relative position, transmitted waveforms and channel state. In this paper, we consider an un-coordinated scenario where a communication receiver is to operate in the presence of a number of radars, of which only a sub-set may be active, which poses the problem of estimating the active waveforms and the relevant parameters thereof, so as to cancel them prior to demodulation. Two algorithms are proposed for such a joint waveform estimation/data demodulation problem, both exploiting sparsity of a proper representation of the interference and of the vector containing the errors of the data block, so as to implement an iterative joint interference removal/data demodulation process. The former algorithm is based on classical on-grid compressed sensing (CS), while the latter forces an atomic norm (AN) constraint: in both cases the radar parameters and the communication demodulation errors can be estimated by solving a convex problem. We also propose a way to improve the efficiency of the AN-based algorithm. The performance of these algorithms are demonstrated through extensive simulations, taking into account a variety of conditions concerning both the interferers and the respective channel states