Transmit waveform design for coexisting radar and communications systems

In recent years, there has been an increased interest in sharing available bandwidth to avoid spectrum congestion. With an ever-increasing number wireless users, it is critical to develop signal processing based spectrum sharing algorithms to achieve cooperative use of the allocated spectrum among multiple systems in order to reduce interference between systems. This work studies the radar and communications systems coexistence problem using two main approaches. The first approach develops methodologies to increase radar target tracking performance under low signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR) conditions due to the coexistence of strong communications interference. The second approach jointly optimizes the performance of both systems by co-designing a common transmit waveform.

When concentrating on improving radar tracking performance, a pulsed radar that is tracking a single target coexisting with high powered communications interference is considered. Although the Cramer-Rao lower bound (CRLB) on the covariance of an unbiased estimator of deterministic parameters provides a bound on the estimation mean squared error (MSE), there exists an SINR threshold at which estimator covariance rapidly deviates from the CRLB. After demonstrating that different radar waveforms experience different estimation SINR thresholds using the Barankin bound (BB), a new radar waveform design method is proposed based on predicting the waveform-dependent BB SINR threshold under low SINR operating conditions.

A novel method of predicting the SINR threshold value for maximum likelihood estimation (MLE) is proposed. A relationship is shown to exist between the formulation of the BB kernel and the probability of selecting sidelobes for the MLE. This relationship is demonstrated as an accurate means of threshold prediction for the radar target parameter estimation of frequency, time-delay and angle-of-arrival.



For the co-design radar and communications system problem, the use of a common transmit waveform for a pulse-Doppler radar and a multiuser communications system is proposed. The signaling scheme for each system is selected from a class of waveforms with nonlinear phase function by optimizing the waveform parameters to minimize interference between the two systems and interference among communications users. Using multi-objective optimization, a trade-off in system performance is demonstrated when selecting waveforms that minimize both system interference and tracking MSE.