On the Effects of Range-Doppler Processing for Target Detection in OFDM-Based RadCom

In integrated radar sensing and radio communication (or simply termed RadCom) literature, a standard method is to use orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) waveforms as communication signals and to sense the echoes of this OFDM signal for radar purposes. While OFDM radar is shown to be simple and effective in proper circumstances, its detection performance under multi-scatterer target scenarios has not been investigated thoroughly yet. This letter focuses on this issue, indicating that the 2-D periodogram method, which is the most commonly used detection method for OFDM radars in the literature, performs poorly when the targets consist of multiple scattering centers. Then, an interference-aware adaptive detector is proposed and shown to be robust against such realistic target scenarios. Analytical and simulation results are provided to support the idea.