Range-Division Multiplexing for MIMO OFDM Joint Radar and Communications

An orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) waveform enables simultaneous radar sensing and communications. In the multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) case with several transmit (Tx) antennas, multiplexing the transmit signals is usually implemented using equidistant subcarrier interleaving (ESI), thus allowing the separation of the transmit signals in frequency domain. In this work, a multiplexing technique denoted as range-division multiplexing (RDMult) is analyzed, which allows separating signals radiated by different Tx antennas along the range axis of a range-Doppler map. This work also investigates the effects of RDMult on the communication task. It turns out that RDMult heavily distorts the channel statistics by introducing a repetitive pattern of deep fading holes, which severely distort the transmission of data. To combat this issue, this work proposes a communication system especially designed for RDMult, including methods for data estimation, channel estimation and synchronization. Simulations confirm the effectiveness of these concepts in terms of bit error ratio (BER) performance.