Practical Frequency-Hopping MIMO Joint Radar Communications: Design and Experiment

TL;DR

This paper presents a practical design and experimental validation of frequency-hopping MIMO joint radar and communications, addressing hardware imperfections and demonstrating real-world implementation with commercial hardware.

Contribution

It introduces the first analytical model of hardware imperfections in FH-MIMO JRC, new waveform designs, and a low-complexity algorithm for joint estimation, validated through over-the-air experiments.

Findings

Hardware imperfections significantly impact FH-MIMO JRC performance.

Proposed waveforms and algorithms achieve high radar and communication performance.

Successful real-world implementation with commercial off-the-shelf hardware.

Abstract

Joint radar and communications (JRC) can realize two radio frequency (RF) functions using one set of resources, greatly saving hardware, energy and spectrum for wireless systems needing both functions. Frequency-hopping (FH) MIMO radar is a popular candidate for JRC, as the achieved communication symbol rate can greatly exceed radar pulse repetition frequency. However, practical transceiver imperfections can fail many existing theoretical designs. In this work, we unveil for the first time the non-trivial impact of hardware imperfections on FH-MIMO JRC and analytically model the impact. We also design new waveforms and, accordingly, develop a low-complexity algorithm to jointly estimate the hardware imperfections of unsynchronized receiver. Moreover, employing low-cost software-defined radios and commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) products, we build the first FH-MIMO JRC experiment platform with radar and communications simultaneously validated over the air. Corroborated by simulation and experiment results, the proposed designs achieves high performances for both radar and communications.