Adaptive pulse shaping for OFDM RadCom systems in highly dynamic scenarios

Due to the spectrum and complexity efficiency, the integrated radar and communications (RadCom) systems have been widely favored, in which orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) is the most popular signal to conduct the two functions simultaneously. However, an unoptimized pulse could suffer from severe inter-carrier interference (ICI) and high out-of-band emission (OOBE), which greatly degrades the system performance. In this paper, we introduce the pulse shaping scheme dedicated to RadCom systems, in which both transmitter and receiver can adaptively design pulses with the assistance of radar estimation. We first optimize the transmitting pulse with the weighted sum of signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR) and OOBE by employing the popular genetic algorithm. Then, we design an improved-matched pulse at the receiver for maximizing the SINR with the fmincon solver. In this way, they both utilize the readily available radar information and keep the pulse optimal even in highly dynamic scenarios, which makes the most of RadCom systems while avoiding the overhead of channel estimation and feedback. Simulations prove the feasibility of proposed scheme and reveal that the radar image and communications SINR stay close to their optimum in most cases with much lower OOBE. An improved-matched pulse can further improve the communications performance when severe ICI occurs compared with a matched pulse.