An adaptive waveform design method for OFDM cognitive radar

Abstract

With fixed emitted waveforms, traditional radars could not achieve optimal performance when the target and environment change. Cognitive radar can apperceive changing information outside, feed back to the transmitter intelligently, and then adjust waveforms to achieve better performance. Therefore, cognitive radar can fit the fast changing environment of modern battlefield better than the traditional radar. The advantage of OFDM signals for cognitive radar is analyzed in this paper firstly. And then, a new architecture of OFDM cognitive radar is proposed. The crucial component - adaptive waveform design for the OFDM cognitive radar is addressed to solve the key problem of “learning” and “feedback” in cognitive radar. The main idea is to establish the “estimation-optimization” mechanism to handle the changing of the target and the surrounding environment. Simulation results demonstrate that the performance of OFDM cognitive radar is better than that of traditional radar.