Interference Alignment Based Spectrum Sharing for MIMO Radar and Communication Systems

When Multi-Input Multi-Output (MIMO) radar and communication transceivers are co-existing and operating simultaneously in the same frequency band, interference can be managed by designing signal spaces that facilitate spectrum sharing. In this paper, a spatial precoder-decoder design based on Interference Alignment (IA) is proposed assuming that an interference channel is shared by K_c communication users and K_r radar users. In order to find an IA based precoder-decoder solution guaranteeing desired multiplexing gain or diversity order, the design problem is formulated using a rank minimization criterion with rank constraint for the communication subsystem and rank minimization criterion with l₀ norm constraint for the radar, respectively. To deal with the non-convex nature of the optimization problem, we relax the problem by using nuclear norm. A generalized likelihood ratio test for target detection and a maximum likelihood estimator for target direction parameter are derived. The performance of the proposed IA based precoder-decoder design is analyzed using the GLRT detector and the ML estimator for MIMO radar. Analytical and simulation results show that radar detection performance is similar to the interference-free case with desired diversity order if the decoder matrix is semi-unitary and IA is perfect.