An Efficient Radar Receiver for OFDM-based Joint Radar and Communication Systems

TL;DR

This paper introduces an efficient OFDM-based radar detection system that estimates target parameters with high resolution and low computational cost, suitable for joint radar and communication applications in the 77GHz band.

Contribution

It presents a novel radar detection approach using 2D-Periodogram, DFT-CE, Zadoff-Chu precoding, and a sparse Fourier transform algorithm to enhance performance and reduce complexity.

Findings

Achieves 30.52 cm range resolution and 0.67 m/s velocity resolution.

Reduces periodogram computation time by approximately 98.84%.

Maintains radar estimation performance with communication precoding in good SNR conditions.

Abstract

We propose in this work a radar detection system for orthogonal-frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) transmission. We assume that the transmitting antenna Tx is colocated with a monostatic radar. The latter knows the transmitted signal and listens to echoes coming from the reflection of fixed or moving targets. We estimate the targets parameters (range and velocity) using a 2D-Periodogram. Moreover, we improve the estimation performance in low signal to noise ratio (SNR) conditions using the discrete Fourier transform channel estimation (DFT-CE) and we show that Zadoff-Chu precoding (ZCP) adopted for communication, does not degrade the radar estimation in good SNR conditions. Furthermore, since the dimensions of the data matrix can be much larger than the number of targets to be detected, we propose a sparse Fourier transform based Fourier projection-slice (FPS-SFT) algorithm to reduce the computational complexity of the 2D-Periodogram. An appropriate system parameterization in the 77GHz industrial, scientific and medical (ISM) band, allows to achieve a range resolution of 30.52 cm and a velocity resolution of 0.67 m/s and to reduce the periodogram computation time up to around 98.84%.