Construction of unimodular sequence sets for periodic correlations

Abstract

Sequence sets with good periodic correlation properties can be used in many areas, including communications, medical imaging, radar (such as over-the-horizon radar) and sonar. Practical hardware constraints, such as power amplifiers, usually require the transmitted waveforms be unimodular. We present herein new computationally efficient algorithms that can be used for the design of unimodular sequence sets with essentially zero auto-correlation sidelobes and cross-correlations in a specified time lag zone, as well as of sequence sets with good correlations over all time lags. The proposed algorithms start from random phase initializations and can generate many different sequence sets (including very long sequence sets) possessing similarly good correlation properties.