Friendly spectrally shaped radar waveform with legacy communication systems for shared access and spectrum management

Abstract

In this paper, we investigate a friendly spectrally shaped radar waveform design that can be used in a spectral band being utilized by one or more communication systems. We specifically consider legacy communication systems as opposed to cooperative communication systems to address the ever present problem of legacy technologies. This radar waveform is able to share the spectrum with the existing communication systems such that its detection performance is not compromised while trying to help the legacy systems maintain their own symbol error rates (SERs). We show with various scenarios that the spectrally shaped radar waveform outperforms the traditional wideband pulse waveform in terms of detection performance with the communication signals acting as interference to the radar. Moreover, SERs of the legacy systems employing quaternary phase-shift keying modulation in the presence of the shaped radar waveform (acting as interference) outperform SERs of systems under traditional radar pulse interference. These SERs are very close to theoretical noise-only SERs.