Amplitude Mutual Information-Based Radar Waveform Design for Integrated Radar and Communication Systems

The integrated radar and communication systems can effectively solve the problem of lack of spectrum resources, which is a typical application of spectrum sharing technology. This paper considers the problem of amplitude mutual information-based radar waveform design for the integrated radar and communication systems in the same frequency band. The joint radar-communication mutual information (MI) is proposed to be utilized as the integrated performance metric for integrated systems. The joint radar-communication MI is the sum of radar amplitude MI and conditional communication MI with knowing radar channels. Based on this model, the MI and Neyman-Pearson (NP) criteria are considered to optimize the multi-carrier radar waveform under total transmit power and channel capacity constraints. We employ the waveform design method to investigate the performance of target detection. Numerical results demonstrate that the performance of target detection can be efficiently improved by exploiting the amplitude MI-based and NP-based criteria. It is also shown that the performance of MI-based method tends to be the same as MI-based method in high signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). The scattered part of the communication signal at the target can improve the target detection probability by 11.06% to 34.71%.