Dual-Function Radar Communication System With Communication and Radar Performance Tradeoff

With today’s technology, radio frequency front-end architectures are very similar in radar and wireless communication systems. Further, in an effort to access more bandwidth, wireless systems have been shifting to frequency bands that have been traditionally occupied by radar systems. Given the hardware and frequency convergence, there is a lot of recent interest in the integration of the radar and communication functions in one system. Such integration will enable more efficient use of spectrum, reduce device size/cost and power consumption, and will also offer the potential for significant performance enhancement of both sensing and communication functions. Dual Function Radar-Communication (DFRC) systems is a class of integrated sensing-communication (ISC) systems that use the same waveform as well as the same hardware platform for both sensing and communication purposes. Thus, DFRC systems can achieve higher spectral efficiency than most ISC systems, require simpler transmitter hardware and a smaller, less expensive device. DFRC systems are prime candidates for autonomous driving vehicles, unmanned aerial vehicles, surveillance, search and rescue, and networked robots in advanced manufacturing applications that rely on censing and communications.

In the talk, we will present a novel DFRC system that uses the available bandwidth efficiently for both communication as well as sensing. The system transmits wideband, orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) waveforms and allows the transmit antennas to use subcarriers in a shared fashion. When all subcarriers are used in a shared fashion, the proposed system achieves high communication rate, while its sensing performance is limited by the size of the receive array. By reserving some subcarriers for exclusive use by transmit antennas (private subcarriers), the communication rate can be traded off for improved sensing performance.