Joint Radar and Communication System employing an adapted linear frequency modulated chirp combination

During the last years there has been a trend to combine radar and communication modules into a single system. The reason for this is to reduce the cost of hardware, complexity, and power consumption. Also to offer customers the added benefit of a comprehensive system. A first sight, there are two simple ways of implementing such a system. The first is a temporal separation between the operation of the communication or radar subsystem. The second approach is spectral separation, i.e. radar and communication use strictly separate frequency bands. However, due to the highly flexible tools offered by Software Defined Radios (SDR) a third approach can be realised. In this approach, presented in this paper, the radar waveform is combined with a communication waveform in such a way that both subsystems can be operated simultaneously. Theoretical analysis and simulation results show that the proposed integrated waveform performs well and meets practical requirements.