Co-Designing Statistical MIMO Radar and In-band Full-Duplex Multi-User MIMO Communications -- Part I: Signal Processing

TL;DR

This paper develops a joint signal processing framework for a distributed MIMO radar and full-duplex multi-user MIMO communication system sharing the same spectrum, addressing practical constraints and improving detection and data rates.

Contribution

It introduces a novel signal processing approach for distributed IBFD MIMO radar and MU-MIMO communications, considering real-world constraints and target reflection exploitation.

Findings

Enhanced radar target detection compared to conventional codes

Higher achievable data rates than standard precoders

Effective coexistence of radar and communication systems in shared spectrum

Abstract

We consider a spectral sharing problem in which a statistical (or widely distributed) multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) radar and an in-band full-duplex (IBFD) multi-user MIMO (MU-MIMO) communications system concurrently operate within the same frequency band. Prior works on joint MIMO-radar-MIMO-communications (MRMC) systems largely focus on either colocated MIMO radars, half-duplex MIMO communications, single-user scenarios, omit practical constraints (clutter, uplink [UL]/downlink [DL] transmit powers, UL/DL quality-of-service, and peak-to-average-power ratio), or MRMC co-existence that employs separate transmit/receive units. The purpose of this and companion papers (Part II and III) is to co-design an MRMC framework that addresses all of these issues. In this paper, we propose signal processing for a distributed IBFD MRMC, where radar receiver is designed to additionally exploit the downlink communications signals reflected from a radar target. Extensive numerical experiments show that our methods improve radar target detection over conventional codes and yield a higher achievable data rate than standard precoders. The following companion paper (Part II) describes the theory and procedure of our algorithm to solve the non-convex design problem. The final companion paper (Part II) considers the case of multiple targets and examines the tracking performance of our MRMC system.