Performance Analysis of Joint Radar-Communication System Based on FDA-MIMO Radar

Faced with the increasingly complicated electromagnetic environment, the joint design of radar and communication system has been an effective solution to save spectrum resources and reduce the complexity of system hardware. By introducing index modulation, we design a joint radar-communication system based on the frequency diverse array (FDA) based multiple-input-multiple-output (MIMO) radar. Different from the conventional phased-array (PA) radar and MIMO radar array, the FDA-MIMO radar can generate range-angle-dependent beampattern, which enables the distinctive signal processing methods. In this paper, we proceed the investigation on performance of the proposed joint system scheme by firstly establishing the three-dimension (3D) signal model for the radar subsystem, based on which the achievable radar resolution in range, angle and Doppler dimension can be estimated. Since the beampattern of FDA-MIMO radar is range-dependent, the proposed joint system can achieve interference suppression of the false targets in radar mainlobe. For communication subsystem, a communication security enhancement approach is devised, followed by the derivation of the theoretical SER upper bound. The numerical results demonstrate the effectiveness and superiority compared with the other dual-function systems based on conventional multi-antenna arrays.