Joint Radar and Communications for Frequency-Hopped MIMO Systems

Contention in the frequency spectrum has seen the emergence of Dual-Function Radar Communications (DFRC) systems, enabling frequency-hopped (FH) multiple-input-multiple-output (MIMO) waveforms to carry communication symbols. While a variety of novel signaling strategies have been developed to facilitate the communication function, their implementation in slow-time results in the achievable data rate being limited by the radar pulse repetition interval. We develop a generalized framework for performing information embedding in DFRC systems by exploiting the fast-time structure of the transmitted radar waveform. By defining a unified formulation, we show that a variety of existing signaling strategies can be accommodated, including FH index modulation, FH permutation, quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM), M-arry PSK (MPSK) modulation and/or frequency carrier index modulation. In addition, we use this framework to propose hybrid modulation strategies constructed using combinations of the aforementioned schemes to produce significant improvements in the achievable data rate over the individual signaling schemes. Simulation results demonstrate that the hybrid schemes can deliver significantly higher bit rates with only small increases in the required $E_b/N_0$ . They also show that, in terms of the impact on the radar operation, the frequency hopping code selection has the highest range sidelobes whereas the PSK schemes suffer from significant spectral leakage. Finally, we also give a discussion of the issues and open problems that remain unaddressed.