Radar system design for dual-functionality platforms

Abstract

Dual-functionality platforms have recently been proposed to jointly and simultaneously enable radar target illumination and establish wireless communication links. This duality serves as means to alleviate the spectrum congestion crisis. In this paper, we consider the problem of radar system design for dual-function radar-communications (DFRC). We develop a new transmit signaling scheme which permits the embedding of communication symbols in the radar signal emissions. The proposed scheme recognizes the radar and communication signal deliveries as the primary and secondary functions, respectively, and strives to have a minimum impact of the DFRC system on radar operation integrity. In particular, we investigate how the embedding of communication symbols into the radar emission affects the transmit power efficiency. The performance of the proposed technique is validated using simulation examples.