MIMO-OCDM-based Joint Radar Sensing and Communication

This study investigates two multiplexing schemes for enabling multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) operation of orthogonal chirp-division multiplexing (OCDM)-based Radar-Communication (RadCom) systems, namely code-division multiplexing (CDM) via outer coding and frequency-division multiplexing (FDM) via frequency shift precoding (FSP). After detailed system model description for both multiplexing strategies, radar and communication aspects of the studied MIMO-OCDM RadCom system are analyzed having the conventional MIMO-OFDM RadCom as a baseline. Finally, it is concluded that CDM based on outer coding may yield better radar and communication performance than its FDM counterpart, while still outperforming MIMO-OFDM in terms of communication at the cost of higher range sidelobe level.