Joint Radar-Communication With Cyclic Prefixed Single Carrier Waveforms

In recent years, software defined radio and digital signal processing have been widely used in communication and radar. As a result, the hardware and RF front-end for radar and wireless communication tends to be similar. Thus, using the same RF and hardware platform for joint radar-communication becomes viable. Joint radar-communication would bring more efficient plan and usage for the radio spectral resource. Furthermore, it could enable new applications that require information exchange and precise localization at the same time. In this paper, cyclic prefixed single carrier (CP-SC) and its variations are chosen as the waveforms for joint radar-communication. CP-SC waveform and its variations are popular in wireless communication and have been chosen by a few standards like IEEE 802.11ad and LTE-advanced. Efficient algorithms are proposed to use such waveforms for range and speed detection/estimation of targets. The proposed algorithms are derived from the maximum likelihood (ML) principle and have low computational complexity. Simulations show that the estimation performance of the proposed method is almost the same as that of ML and is much better than that of the channel estimation based method.