IRCI Free Colocated MIMO Radar Based on Sufficient Cyclic Prefix OFDM Waveforms

Abstract: In this paper, we propose a cyclic prefix (CP) based MIMO-OFDM range reconstruction method and its corresponding MIMO-OFDM waveform design for co-located MIMO radar systems. Our proposed MIMO-OFDM waveform design achieves the maximum signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) gain after the range reconstruction and its peak-to-average power ratio (PAPR) in the discrete time domain is also optimal, i.e., 0dB, when Zadoff-Chu sequences are used in the discrete frequency domain as the weighting coefficients for the subcarriers. We also investigate the performance when there are transmit and receive digital beamforming (DBF) pointing errors. It is shown that our proposed CP based MIMO-OFDM range reconstruction is inter-range-cell interference (IRCI) free no matter whether there are transmit and receive DBF pointing errors or not. Simulation results are presented to verify the theory and compare it with the conventional OFDM and LFM co-located MIMO radars.