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

Orbital Angular Momentum Waves: Generation, Detection and Emerging Applications

Orbital angular momentum (OAM) has aroused a widespread interest in many fields, especially in telecommunications due to its potential for unleashing new capacity in the severely congested spectrum of commercial communication systems. Beams carrying OAM have a helical phase front and a field strength with a singularity along the axial center, which can be used for information transmission, imaging and particle manipulation. The number of orthogonal OAM modes in a single beam is theoretically infinite and each mode is an element of a complete orthogonal basis that can be employed for multiplexing different signals, thus greatly improving the spectrum efficiency. In this paper, we comprehensively summarize and compare the methods for generation and detection of optical OAM, radio OAM and acoustic OAM. Then, we represent the applications and technical challenges of OAM in communications, including free-space optical communications, optical fiber communications, radio communications and acoustic communications. To complete our survey, we also discuss the state of art of particle manipulation and target imaging with OAM beams

Joint Range and Doppler Adaptive Processing for CBM based DFRC systems

Recently, dual-function radar communication (DFRC) systems have been proposed to integrate radar and communication into one platform for spectrum sharing. Various signalling strategies have been proposed to embed communication information into the radar transmitted waveforms. Among these, complex beampattern modulation (CBM) embeds communication information into the complex transmit beampattens via changing the amplitude and phase of the beampatterns towards the communication receiver. The embedding of random communication information causes the clutter modulation and high range-Doppler sidelobe. What's more, transmitting different waveforms on a pulse to pulse basis degrades the radar target detection capacity when traditional sequential pulse compression (SPC) and moving-target detection (MTD) is utilized. In this paper, a minimum mean square error (MMSE) based filter, denoted as joint range and Doppler adaptive processing (JRDAP) is proposed. The proposed method estimates the targets' impulse response coefficients at each range-Doppler cell adaptively to suppress high range-Doppler sidelobe and clutter modulation. The performance of proposed method is very close to the full-dimension adaptive multiple pulses compression (AMPC) while reducing computational complexity greatly.Comment: 11 pages, 5 figure

Application of advanced technology to space automation

Automated operations in space provide the key to optimized mission design and data acquisition at minimum cost for the future. The results of this study strongly accentuate this statement and should provide further incentive for immediate development of specific automtion technology as defined herein. Essential automation technology requirements were identified for future programs. The study was undertaken to address the future role of automation in the space program, the potential benefits to be derived, and the technology efforts that should be directed toward obtaining these benefits