Waveform design with constellation extension for OFDM dual-functional radar-communications

Orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) is widely used and works efficiently for the communication, but emerging applications requires OFDM to be flexible to meet sensing requirements. The time-frequency waveform design of OFDM for dual-functional radar-communications (DFRC) is critical to achieve the future communication and sensing requirements. Therefore, we propose a novel method to minimize Cramér-Rao bounds (CRBs) of the delay and Doppler estimation to improve radar performance of an OFDM DFRC system. Although some methods are proposed in the literature to improve the CRBs, these methods either require feedforward signaling or subcarrier reservation. However, it is possible to exploit the constellation extension of quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM) to achieve lower CRBs without these requirements. Therefore, the proposed method provides a transparent communication along with the CRB minimization for conventional OFDM systems. For the evaluation of the proposed method, CRB and symbol error rate (SER) are considered in the simulation results. Furthermore, the theoretical SER analysis of the proposed method is derived to understand the effects of CRB minimization on the communication performance.