Reducing Hardware Requirements and Computational Effort for Automotive OFDM Radar Systems

The orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) signaling scheme is a promising waveform for future automotive radar systems. However, in its standard implementation, it comes with massive requirements on the hardware required for storing and processing the received OFDM signals. Moreover, one has no full control over the size of the range-Doppler map (RDM). In this work, a novel OFDM receiver signal processing scheme is proposed that impressively reduces the required memory, reduces computational requirements, and gives full control over the size of the RDM. The effects of the proposed receiver processing scheme on the required hardware and the signal-to-noise ratio are discussed.