Wideband OFDM pulse burst and its capabilities for the Doppler processing in radar

Abstract

The use of multicarrier (MC) signals could support a new generation of radar that would provide simultaneously RF agility and Doppler processing. Easy to generate in digital signal processing (DSP), the well-known orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM), originally a communication waveform, is a first choice candidate. Its flexible structure makes both radar concepts of continuous and pulse burst waveforms, compatible. In this paper, the focus is on the pulse burst. The novelty of the paper is to investigate capabilities for Doppler processing of the OFDM pulse burst in both narrowband and wideband cases. Since the waveformpsilas bandwidth-time (BT) product is high, the analysis starts with the narrowband approximation (very low speeds) and rapidly moves on to the true wideband version (higher speeds) of the Doppler effect, in an elementary scenario with a single point target.