Performance optimization and parameters estimation for MIMO-OFDM dual-functional communication-radar systems

Dual-function communication radar systems use common Radio Frequency (RF) signals are used for both communication and detection. For better compatibility with existing communication systems, we adopt Multiple-Input Multiple-Output (MIMO) Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) signals as integrated signals and investigate the estimation performance of MIMO-OFDM signals. First, we analyze the Cramer-Rao Lower Bound (CRLB) of parameter estimation. Then, the transmit powers over different subcarriers are optimized to achieve the best tradeoff between the transmission rate and the estimation performance. Finally, we propose a more accurate estimation method that uses Canonical Polyadic Decomposition (CPD) of the third-order tensor to obtain the parameter matrices. Due to the characteristic of the column structure of the parameter matrices, we only need to use DFT / IDFT to recover the parameters of multiple targets. The simulation results show that tensor-based estimation method can achieve a performance close to CRLB, and the estimation performance can be improved by optimizing the transmit powers.