Spatial Modulation for Joint Radar-Communications Systems: Design, Analysis, and Hardware Prototype

Dual-function radar-communications (DFRC) systems implement radar and communication functionalities on a single platform. Jointly designing these subsystems can lead to substantial gains in performance as well as size, cost, and power consumption. In this paper, we propose a DFRC system, which utili...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:IEEE transactions on vehicular technology 2021-03, Vol.70 (3), p.2283-2298
Main Authors: Ma, Dingyou, Shlezinger, Nir, Huang, Tianyao, Shavit, Yariv, Namer, Moshe, Liu, Yimin, Eldar, Yonina C.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Allocations
Angular resolution
Antennas
Cellular communication
Communication
Communications systems
GSM
Hardware
Joint radar-communications system
Modulation
Performance evaluation
Power consumption
Prototypes
Radar
Radar antennas
Resource management
Sidelobe reduction
Sidelobes
Signal processing
spatial modulation
Subsystems
Transmitting antennas
Waveforms
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Summary:Dual-function radar-communications (DFRC) systems implement radar and communication functionalities on a single platform. Jointly designing these subsystems can lead to substantial gains in performance as well as size, cost, and power consumption. In this paper, we propose a DFRC system, which utilizes generalized spatial modulation (GSM) to realize coexisting radar and communications waveforms. Our proposed GSM-based scheme, referred to as spatial modulation based communication-radar (SpaCoR) system, allocates antenna elements among the subsystems based on the transmitted message, thus achieving increased communication rates by embedding additional data bits in the antenna selection. We formulate the resulting signal models, and present a dedicated radar processing scheme. To evaluate the radar performance, we characterize the statistical properties of the transmit beam pattern. Then, we present a hardware prototype of the proposed DFRC system, demonstrating the feasibility of the scheme. Our results show that the proposed GSM system achieves improved communication performance compared to techniques utilizing fixed allocations operating at the same data rate. For the radar subsystem, our experiments show that the spatial agility induced by the GSM transmission improves the angular resolution and reduces the sidelobe level in the transmit beam pattern compared to using fixed antenna allocations.
ISSN:0018-9545
1939-9359
DOI:10.1109/TVT.2021.3056408