IRCI Free Range Reconstruction for SAR Imaging with Arbitrary Length OFDM Pulse

Abstract: Our previously proposed OFDM with sufficient cyclic prefix (CP) synthetic aperture radar (SAR) imaging algorithm is inter-range-cell interference (IRCI) free and achieves ideally zero range sidelobes for range reconstruction. In this OFDM SAR imaging algorithm, the minimum required CP length is almost equal to the number of range cells in a swath, while the number of subcarriers of an OFDM signal needs to be more than the CP length. This makes the length of a transmitted OFDM sequence at least almost twice of the number of range cells in a swath and for a wide swath imaging, the transmitted OFDM pulse length becomes long, which may cause problems in some radar applications. In this paper, we propose a CP based OFDM SAR imaging with arbitrary pulse length, which has IRCI free range reconstruction and its pulse length is independent of a swath width. We then present a novel design method for our proposed arbitrary length OFDM pulses. Simulation results are presented to illustrate the performances of the OFDM pulse design and the arbitrary pulse length CP based OFDM SAR imaging.