First Demonstration of Joint Wireless Communication and High-Resolution SAR Imaging Using Airborne MIMO Radar System

Special attention has been devoted to joint wireless communication and radar sensing systems in recent years. However, since communication and radar have conflict requirements in terms of waveforms, transceiver developments, and signal processing algorithms, realization of this system concept is still a great challenge. In this paper, we introduce an airborne multi-input multi-output (MIMO) radar, along with the modified orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) and space-time coding (STC) waveform schemes, for the implementation of the joint wireless communication and synthetic aperture radar (SAR) imaging. The proposed system, which simultaneously transmits multidimensional waveforms with reconfigurable channels, can acquire adequate degrees of freedom. Thereby, it becomes a feasible method to perform both data transmission and high-resolution SAR imaging at the same time without intramodal interference. Theoretical analysis is validated by laboratory and flight experiments. Through our analysis, we aim to open up a new perspective of using MIMO radar to realize joint wireless communication and SAR imaging.