Design and Testing of Low Probability of Intercept Waveforms for Joint Radar and Communications

Research topics Wireless communications | Radar | Integrated sensing and communications | Defence applications

Description

In defence and military applications there are often scenarios where a user needs to both sense the environment for potential threats, and transmit covert or secure information. Achieving these goals within a congested and contested environment requires innovation in how the Electromagnetic Environment (EME) is managed to ensure military dominance in the Electronic Warfare (EW) battlespace. Current radar waveforms are not optimized for communications functionalities, and vice versa.
The objective of this project is to design and test on experimental hardware new low probability of intercept (LPI) waveforms for radar detection that also carry information for wireless signalling - dual functional radar and communications (DFRC). This allows a single transmitting device, with a single signal transmission, and a single frequency band to carry out both radar and communication operations, where previously the two separate systems (radar vs communications) would compete for the spectral resources.
The outputs from this work match directly to predicted future RF sensing and communication deployments that hope to be agile, spectrum efficient and intelligent usage. Accordingly, the proposed approach drastically cuts:
-    hardware and power resources, by allowing DFRC through a single device
-    spectral resources and interference to other systems, by allowing radar and communications operations through a single frequency band and single channel use.

This project addresses the DASA call’s “multi-function systems” challenge through the proposed dual functionality, and “adversary threat” challenge through the LPI approach.