Information Decoding and SDR Implementation of DFRC Systems Without Training Signals

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel SDR-based method for decoding information in DFRC systems without training signals, demonstrating effective BER performance for PSK modulated MIMO FH radar pulses.

Contribution

It presents a new decoding approach for DFRC systems that eliminates the need for training data, implemented and tested using SDR hardware.

Findings

SDR implementation achieves low BER at high SNR levels

Decoding method performs well for differential binary and quadrature PSK

Results compare favorably with numerical simulations

Abstract

Recent performance analysis of dual-function radar communications (DFRC) systems, which embed information using phase shift keying (PSK) into multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) frequency hopping (FH) radar pulses, shows promising results for addressing spectrum sharing issues between radar and communications. However, the problem of decoding information at the communication receiver remains challenging, since the DFRC transmitter is typically assumed to transmit only information embedded radar waveforms and not the training sequence. We propose a novel method for decoding information at the communication receiver without using training data, which is implemented using a software-defined radio (SDR). The performance of the SDR implementation is examined in terms of bit error rate (BER) as a function of signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) for differential binary and quadrature phase shift keying modulation schemes and compared with the BER versus SNR obtained with numerical simulations.