Dual-functional radar-communication based on frequency modulated continuous wave exploiting constraint frequency hopping

This paper focuses on the design of a frequency modulated continuous wave (FMCW) dual-functional radarcommunication (DFRC) system with low-loss radar detection performance, aiming at achieving a balance among communication rate, symbol error rate (SER), and out-of-band leakage. For what the communication functionality concerns, the constrained frequency hopping (C-FH) sequence mapping and up/down chirp are used to embed data, limiting the out-of-band leakage. We provide explicit rules for traversal-FH sequence to adjust the number of configurable frequency points within each chip, and limit the SER at the receiver. For the radar signal processing, after coherent processing and sampling, we proceed time-domain extension and range-bin phase compensation (TE-RBPC) according to the FH value, achieving the same range profile as an unmodulated (FMCW) without any influence from the FH sequences. The simulation results show that the proposed C-FHchirp waveform reduces the out-of-band power leakage by 10 dB if compared with a phase shift keying scheme, and provides a 5 dB improvement in the signal noise ratio under the same SER if compared with an unconstrained FH-chirp scheme. Moreover, by comparing it with a scheme without compensation, the sidelobe amplitude of radar range profile in TE-RBPC scheme is reduced by about 39 dB.