On Spectrum Sharing for Pulse-Doppler Radar and OFDM Communications

Radar receivers must be extremely sensitive to detect faint target signatures. To this end pulse-Doppler processing of pulse compression waveforms integrates faint target echoes across multiple pulses by matching to the Doppler shift of target returns. Therefore, the combination of receiver sensitivity and exploitation of the target return frequency structure implies that radar signal processing will be sensitive to structured interference, such as that from communications systems. To explore this sensitivity, we examine the impact of a popular communications waveform, orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM), on the output of pulse-Doppler signal processing. Understanding the impact of cross-function interference will improve requirements generation for both dual-function and shared spectrum systems.