A New Method of Joint Radar and Communication Waveform Design and Signal Processing Based on OFDM-chirp

Waveform design of joint radar and communication has become a focus of intense research in recent years. Some scholars have proposed to use the odd and even carrier of Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) signal to modulate the radar and communication functions, respectively, to realize the integration. However, OFDM systems generally use cyclic prefix to avoid Inter-Carrier Interference (ICI) and Inter-Symbol Interference (ISI) caused by multipath effects, reducing energy utilization and creating false targets, which affect radar performance. In addition, the traditional OFDM integrated signal is more sensitive to Doppler shift. A small Doppler frequency offset will also cause a considerable drop in orthogonal performance. On this basis, this paper proposes a new waveform design and processing method. This method uses blank guard intervals to replace cyclic prefixes, which can resist multipath effects while avoiding false targets introduced by cyclic prefixes, effectively preventing ICI and ISI. In terms of signal processing methods, this paper proposes a method for channel estimation and Doppler compensation using the priori information of the radar signal. Compared with the traditional method, this new method reduces the system’s resource overhead, such as pilot frequency and training sequence. It improves energy utilization and spectrum efficiency. The peak side lobe ratio, integration side lobe rate, and bit error ratio are also improved. Simulation experiments verify the effectiveness of this method.